“Unless they see the reality, they will not understand.” – Half the Sky
Opening our eyes to true reality is essential to authentic love. Wanting to understand who people are and why their lives have the shape that they do is a prerequisite to honest relationship. Brokenness and pain don’t just drop out of the sky one day. Someone brings it. Something causes it. Where there is oppression, there is a system that enables it to thrive.
A high mortality rate for pregnant women in Somaliland doesn’t exist because God doesn’t like them or because Americans haven’t made enough mission trips there. It exists because of abusive traditions, a lack of infrastructure, and of course, poverty.
Statistics are easily discarded and lives brushed off as ‘those poor women.’ But knowing the foundation supporting the statistics allows you to more fully enter their story.
The point of the book Half the Sky and the documentary is to bring these stories up close. To move past statistics, into the lives. But after reading and seeing, we have to do the hard work of digging into the foundation.
“Rape is forgivable, while being raped is an unpardonable sin.” – Half the Sky
Solving the world’s problems will not be done by being content with the easy answers, the surface issues.
It’s not enough to tell men not to rape. It’s not even enough to arrest the rapist. What good is an arrest if the police are corrupt? What good is a decent policeman if the justice system is non-existent or impossibly backed up? What good is a conviction if the cultural attitudes still leave the victim shamed and feeling worthless?
Layers of issues sit underneath a single problem. Focusing on the problem while ignoring the causes actually perpetuates the problem. If we devoted all of our resources to, helping, say, food banks, without ever considering why people need that help, we’d never move closer to actually fixing the need.
We have to know the underlying story. Having context for a situation is imperative.
If loving people is the sacred aim, we have to submerge into the depths of their reality.
This post is Day 5 in the 31 Days to Loving the World series.
Great post, Caris. I would say that submerging into the depths of others’ pain, especially when it’s related to sexual or domestic violence, can lead to secondhand trauma. That should never be an excuse to learn and show compassion on others, but it should teach us the value of self-care.
Very true, Caris. We too easily and quickly focus on “solving” the problem rather than understanding why the problem exists. It’s much easier to put a band-aid on it and call it better than to deal with the long, difficult and unrewarding work of transformation. I think American culture is particularly guilty of this. We like quick and easy solutions, not the hard work of analysis and understanding. Unfortunately the American church too often falls into this same behavior. So we stock foodbanks and fund elaborate relief efforts but fail to work toward significant changes that take time and effort and don’t produce quick results. I’m not saying we should ignore the immediate effects of problems, but we must move beyond the short-term fixes.
oh that’s a really good point.
My husband and I have been talking about this, about things our church is doing/not doing, and brainstorming ideas….and once you get to the implementation stage, it’s really overwhelming. Especially if you’re not gifted in that area. I can come up with the ideas, I just need someone else to organize it and set it all up, haha.