Love

I have never been accused of being too quiet. While I am small in stature, I have a loud voice and an even louder voice. I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes my laughter cuts through the silence at inconvenient times. One of my professors, who had a wife the same height as me, commented that short people get all the emotion of taller people but in smaller packages, so it comes out in significant expressions. That has certainly been true of me. 

And yet. 

And yet, I am often more reserved about speaking my truth. Especially in the community.  It doesn’t feel safe. Because of the times when I have said what is accurate and of value to me, it has been debated with the rigor of examining intellectual concepts instead of noticing that it isn’t an idea being discussed, but me—my very self.
Hence, there is a need for more spaces where we encourage people to speak their truth in a way that respects other people’s truth. It sounds like “love your neighbors as yourself,” but we aren’t always good about that. We want to demand that others respect us while failing to respect them. 
We honor that we are created differently. We think differently. Express ourselves differently. Process information differently. And so, we respect ourselves in speaking our truth and respect others by making room for them to do the same. 

​How could such respect, modeled and lived into and help change the tenor of conversations, one at a time?