T.S. Tuesday: Why I am Pro-Choice
“If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.” T.S. Eliot In the spring of 2006, the terms of my life were turned upside down. Life gave me anger. Anger at injustice and poverty and the overall suckiness of a broken world. After what I’d seen, I thought I had no choice. I thought I had no choice but to wallow, to lash out, to leave the church that was complicit in the complacency that allows injustice. But in the midst of this anger, I ever-so-painfully learned something. I discovered that faith and hope and love can be chosen. Not only can but must. I learned this because I was choosing precisely the opposite: not to have faith, not to have hope, not to have love. It seems like something you can't choose. You're either a glass-is-half-empty or glass-is-half-full type of person and there's nothing you can do about it. But that's not true. You can choose hope. I can choose hope. There’s a part I didn’t choose: the suffering that I witnessed. The policies and politics that have been in place in Latin America long before I was born. The terms the world offers me. But I can choose my response. This weekend I had the immense privilege of being a part of something hopeful. I saw the fruit of choosing to love and serve and engage that has been years in the making. This weekend I helped host an event at my church that highlighted many of the world’s injustices: poverty, environmental degradation, sex trafficking, and the obligation of the church to respond in awareness and compassion. I heard testimonies of men and women in my church who have chosen to do something. Who have chosen love for our neighbor. Who have chosen faith in the redemptive work of a loving God. Who have chosen hope. Planting a tree is an act of hope. Making a donation to a poverty fighting organization is an act of hope. Befriending our brothers and sisters who live outside here in San Diego is an act of hope. Delivering furniture to a newly relocated refugee family is an act of hope. I am grateful to be a part of a church whose heart beats for justice. Whose heart beats for hope. I can’t even express the humble awe I feel that God would use me to share this hope with others. That God would use me to give people the chance to get involved in His work of feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and caring for the poor. That, years later, I would be working from within the church to reverse the complacency and disengagement that led me to leave in the first place. I don’t mean this to sound like I’m tooting my own horn. I type these words in amazement that I am here. That I am leading. That the guilt and pain and anger that once engulfed me has been driven out by love. That the drive for justice and redemption grows stronger not weaker as I choose to engage a broken church and a broken world. I am grateful for the strength I am given to impose my own hopeful terms upon life. Most of all, I am grateful for the Hope that chose me. 
Helpless to Helpful, One Block at Time
As an empowered, white young woman with a college degree and healthy dose of idealism, the world is my oyster. But instead of embracing this freedom, I love to feign displeasure at all of the overwhelming choices I have to make on a daily basis:
As much as I pretend to get all flustered and overwhelmed and indignant that I am “too empowered,” the truth is, I love being in control. What I don’t love is not knowing what to do with this control. I want quick answers and color coded set of instructions.
But outside the protected walls of kindergarten and playtime, these manageable chunks are hard to come by and after a guilt-ridden semester abroad I found myself completely paralyzed, unable to determine block number one.
In the midst of depression and guilt, Love began to speak to me, to urge me out of my shell of shame. I discovered that regardless of my circumstances or how I felt about a situation or all of the million and one factors that conspired to render me frozen and hopeless, I could still choose love. You probably all realized this years ago and I'm just a bit of late bloomer, but I found (and still find) it incredibly empowering to know that I can choose my response. I can’t choose whether or not the world is fair or children die of starvation in Nicaragua (well, not as directly as I’d like), but I can choose my attitude and my next steps.
Instead of watching helplessly as my guilt spun out of control, I stopped doing the things that made me feel guilty. Shopping made me feel sick and guilty after a semester of living out of a backpack, so I decided not to buy clothes for the rest of the year. My roommates teased me and tempted me with shopping excursions and confounded looks, but I found peace in the fact that my actions were beginning to match my beliefs.
I discovered there were many ways I could help the poor, live more sustainably, and incorporate the ideals I had learned about in Costa Rica. But instead of knowing what I should do, but remaining ensnared in guilt, anger, and despair, I actually started to change, to act, to live. I volunteered my time. I began to let my mom and my friends back into my life. I was more intentional about what I bought and how I spent my money. I started going to church again not because I felt guilty or thought it was something I was supposed to do, but because I missed the community. And I didn’t fight every word the pastor said. In small ways, I found I could make a difference.
It was these manageable chunks—one step at a time, one foot in front of the other—that helped me climb reluctantly out of my post-study abroad poverty stupor.
Regardless of what phase of life you’re in, from complacent to content to contrite, I think these manageable chunks of love are the best way to bring about lasting change, the best way to learn to choose love. And I guess this isn’t so much of a new epiphany for me, but more of an addendum to my early days of block numbering.
It’s these baby, baby steps of selflessness and compassion that spur us toward becoming more loving, more compassionate, and more fully engaged in our world.
The knowledge that I can choose to love and empower and give through my thoughts and actions is has been incredibly redemptive for me. I can make a difference little by little. I can learn and grow little by little. I can love little by little.
Hound me later if you think I’m being trite, but welcome to my favorite obsession: “manageable chunks of love.”