“Love empowers us to fulfill the law of the Anointed One as we carry each other’s troubles.”
Curiosity has the potential to be both hero and villain. In health, it can lead to new, exciting discoveries. In angst, curiosity leads to gossip, comparison, and destructive behavior. Like most powerful things in our lives, it has a shadow side. And part of the journey is to learn the difference between the two and navigate the gap with wisdom.
In our communities and families and friendships, curiosity can be toxic. Tabloids have been created to satisfy and perpetuate our hunger to know the intimate details of the lives of famous strangers. We get curious about people's diseases and afflictions and conditions. We gossip about their affairs and failures. It sends whispers around the world and back where the resulting story is as far from the truth as east is from west. We get gleefully curious about the misfortune of others so that we can compare it to our own and measure accordingly.
But just as hunger can be satiated either healthily or irresponsibly, curiosity can bring healing and wholeness to our communities, too. When we get curious about how to fix problems, cross divides, and meet needs. When we get curious about the origin of pain and ask questions and LISTEN to the answers. We must allow ourselves to be humble enough to be curious about where we’ve contributed to the problem and how we can be part of the answer; how people who think differently to us arrived at their conclusions, and how we might be able to sit down and work together.
Our communities will rise and fall depending on what we feed our curiosity.
Powerful, two minute reads that have helped change the script in thousands of people's lives.
Curiosity looks beyond behavior and exasperated words, and into the context of someone's life. And this is key:
You can tell an alcoholic to stop drinking, but they’ll never experience healing unless they deal with the cause of their thirst for numbness. So rather than addressing the drinking, ask where the pain comes from.
You can tell your child to stop crying, and they might. But unless you ask why they’re crying, you might miss something terribly important.
Fences have provided us privacy and protection, but they have also provided us with isolation and division. We hardly know how to talk to each other anymore.
Sure, we share our intimate, personal details on our social media spaces for all to see. We heart and comment and hashtag and frame pictures and take five hundred selfies to post one, but invite our neighbor over for dinner? Tell them face to face about our life? Attentively listen to their's? That requires that we build more tables for us to sit around than fences to keep others out. That requires that we get curious about our unity rather than our image.
A friend of a friend of mine (for real…) has just been diagnosed with stage 3 cancer. My friend said, “I don’t know whether to go over there or not, I don’t want to intrude.”
But the world needs more intruding in these spaces. More showing up. More knocking on doors, witnessing the mess, helping and being and cleaning and knowing. More questions about health and love and why and what can I do?
To carry each other's burdens (Gal 6:2), we have to be curious enough to see that they are there. Curious enough to pick them up and shoulder them. Don’t turn away when you see a friend cry. Don’t change the subject when it gets awkward or hard. Be compassionately curious, present and available. Tear some of those fences down and pull up a seat at the table.
Our communities will rise and fall depending on what we feed our curiosity.
More tomorrow »
Written by Liz Milani
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