This Sunday marks Juneteenth, commemorating the day in 1865 when all slaves in this nation were declared unequivocally free, two-and-a-half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. One hundred and fifty-seven years later, the question is, “Why aren’t we all free yet—and what can we do about it?”
These are hazardous days for human hearts. The wear and tear on our humanity is not normal. We are not built for this relentless urgency, this scale of grief. The risk is that we succumb to it all and stop caring altogether and we can’t afford to do that now. It’s important to protect our hearts so they can remain pliable enough to still break for the world so that we can be agents of healing—but how do we do that? We do it together.
Resilience is not easy. Starting over is never simple, and yet it is the work that leads back to life.