Do You Know How They're Doing?

I was kicked out of an on-campus Christian community during my junior year of college.

I'd joined when I was a freshman, dabbling in and out of Bible studies and Thursday night gatherings, making my best attempt to find anyone I could relate to. I came into that year as an 18-year-old ready to make a new start, had high expectations that I would click with a group of girls on my dorm floor as easily as I did with the friends it took me 12 years to find back at home. But something wasn't working, and I found myself floating in between groups for the better part of those four years.

During my junior year, though, I made the decision to get more involved with that on-campus ministry group. The girls who I met there during my freshman year had grown incredibly close, and I thought that by getting involved, I might get to be part of their circle too. My roommates and I had been slowly drifting apart, and I needed a place to go when they were gone too. So I signed up to be a Bible study leader.

At first, it was exactly what I needed. I got to spend an hour each week with a group of freshman girls, talking to them about what they thought about college, and relationships, and God, too. We swapped stories and shared snacks—my ideal way to spend a Thursday night. And then one of the girls pulled me and my co-leader aside.

“My sister is gay,” she told us, and I had a feeling she was talking about herself too. She wanted to know if she was still welcome in our group. My first instinct was to hug her. “Of course we want you here,” I said. My co-leader nodded.

“We can come up with a plan for how to handle this,” the co-leader told her, and I watched the girl's face fall.

It was the start of the end, a battle between my convictions and theirs. Between our argument over whether the LGBTQ+ community was welcome in this community, through to the decision to remove me from the group because I had a drink before my 21st birthday. Cue eye roll

“They're only concerned with their rules,” I remember telling a friend. “They don't actually care about their people.”

I started thinking about this again recently after talking with a few friends about the state of our country. My friend Hayley sent a text that's stuck with me for days since.

“People only care about what other people are doing right now, not how they're doing," she said.

I think it's the truest thing I've read all year. We've been so isolated from others, left to see just a snippet of what they're doing on social media, only see their hot takes on Twitter. The world (or part of it, at least), has become a reflection of my college years. People shouting, like the ones back in college did, fighting a battle for their rules and beliefs rather than embracing people like the girl who pulled me aside with tears in her eyes, wondering if she could still belong.

There has been a lot of talk about how we start to bridge the polarization separating our country. To me, it starts with people being willing to prioritize our shared humanity over everything else. Instead of thinking about what we want others to do, or how we want others to behave, we could spend more of our time pulling the curtain back, looking for the heartbeats underneath.

The truth is, it's not up to our politicians to bring us together. That's never been their job, and it's certainly never been their strength.

Instead, I think it's up to us. We have to be the ones to reject hatred. To see each and every one of the people in our communities. It's our responsibility to turn to the people around us and ask what it would take for them to feel like they belong. It's our responsibility to listen and to embrace, rather than to control and to judge.

My personal goal for the coming weeks is to step away from the heated arguments on social media. To trade them in for time checking on the people who will be most affected by the upcoming election. To direct my anger into empathy, and show up for the people who are being made to feel like they don't matter.

I think we'd all be better off by turning our concern away from what people are doing, and think more about how they're doing instead.