By: Rev. Laura Robinson
On Monday morning, I sat down for a pre-scheduled coffee meeting with a colleague. It wasn’t a meeting I particularly wanted to go to.
I was grieving the violence in Rafah. I was disgruntled by the immense wealth displayed at a football game when so many in this country struggle to make ends meet. I was scared, angry, and exhausted in the face of another wave of South Carolina (the state my partner and I call home) legislation to curtail access to Gender Affirming medical care.
All in all, I was feeling pretty hopeless, and I wasn’t in the heart- or mind space for any conversation, much less a collaborative, future-looking one. But this meeting had been on the calendar for weeks, and the coffee shop has good cortados, so I went.
My conversation partner and I were meeting to talk about how to bring the Our Whole Lives Sex Ed curriculum to South Carolina. It’s an uphill climb convincing folks down here (and let’s be honest, anywhere) that a comprehensive sex ed curriculum is important to prioritize. But the topic of the conversation feels almost less important than the outcome.
Somehow, by the end of our hour together, something like excitement and hope were starting to make their way back into me. Something like a vision for this one piece of ministry was taking shape. It was a meeting I didn’t want to go to. And yet – it became one of the pieces that’s getting me through.
Building networks, relationships, community, and partnerships takes time, but it’s how I’m able to stay in this work. It’s how I’m able to remain in this fight for love, healing, and justice – even amid so much heartbreak. So much tragedy. So much injustice.
Here at Convergence, we often speak of how important our conversation partners are to the work we do. We value so many of you – those of you who pour into OUR mission and the work we are called to do in the world. It is one of the reasons that we host our online summits, places where dozens of individual voices come together to give energy to a topic important for our days. So, I hold these questions out to you:
Who are you in conversation with? Who’s helping you carry the vision? Who is holding grief, excitement, compassion, and hope by your side?
In this season of love and rending hearts, may you be held by your communities (human and non-human alike), and may you know you’re not alone in any of this. May that knowledge carry you through to another day.
And may peace and joy and hope be yours.
From my hurting heart to yours,
Rev. Laura Robinson
