I love to learn. I love to write.
Over the past 10 years of my life, I've learned a lot about walking with Jesus. My college years were full of fun, but a lot of confusion too. For many years, I wrestled to get a grasp on my identity and my purpose in life. I also found myself overwhelmed by trying to navigate a world full of people, viewpoints, and cultures that I had never experienced.
I grew up in a homeschooled Christian family in Georgia, USA. And, while i'm so grateful to have had the childhood that I did, i'm realizing how much my culture has influenced my worldview. To be honest, I grew up in bit of a bubble, surrounded by people just like me. I don't blame anyone for this because I want to take responsibility for the ways that I have hidden away in that bubble.Humans have a natural tendency to gravitate toward people who share the same interests and culture. But, when you grow up in an echo chamber of voices from people just like you, it's easy to develop assumptions about the people outside of your circles that you don't really know anything about. If we don't have diverse influences speaking into our lives, we become very susceptible to ignorance and a judgmental attitude. Maybe even worse, we won't know how to allow the possibility that we may not know as much as we think we do. If I have learned anything in the last few years, it's that I have so much to unravel and relearn in the way I see the world.
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For the first time in my life, I'm trying to understand the perspectives, experiences, and worldviews of people I've never really listened to. I have questions and I want to wrestle with them. Too often, the church discourages people who ask questions. We think that doubt is something to be avoided and shamed as a sign that you're not really trusting God. But, that's such a poor way of handling something so natural to our humanity. We're going to doubt and instead of dismissing or ignoring it, we need to learn to face it head on and let it lead us to really discover and understand why we believe what we believe.
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I want to have the hard conversations. I don't want to claim to be any kind of expert. I want to elevate voices that are ignored and invalidated. I want to share different viewpoints in order to help us all think differently and be more like Jesus. I want to challenge myself to not settle for what I think I know and always allow the possibility that I might not have the whole picture. I want to listen to understand and not to regurgitate what my echo chamber says. I want to make space for people in my life who are different than me. I have bitten my tongue for so long out of a fear of offending someone. But, I'm realizing that silence might be contributing to the problems we're facing. I pray that we can all seek to be more humble and compassionate and quick to love. I hope that my external processing here can help you to expand your worldview and learn more about the beautiful people that God has placed on the other side of our human-created boundaries.