"I have to believe God is like the people who can't sleep at night because of the pain of someone halfway across the world. Religion should only ever lead you to stand with your neighbor in pain. Who cares what you call it? Maybe just love."
-Brynn Muir
The brilliant Brynn Muir is my dear friend and fellow traveler. We have loved, hated, and longed for Uganda and Rwanda over the past year. We have laughed, cried, hurt, and healed together. Even now, almost a year since living and breathing East Africa, we still bleed our love for humanity, a direct result of the horrors we have witnessed.
This is not about religion. This is not about nationality. This is not about black, white, brown, or purple. And by this, what I mean to say is life. This is about the single thing that binds us all together, the one thing we all have in common in a world that seems so hell-bent on pointing out the differences, and it is simple: we all just want to be loved.
All I can conceivably say on the subject that wherever you're from, whatever faith gets you through the hard times, we must all remember that at the end of the day... the answer is love. It is the moral of the story, the whispered last words, the grand finale, the epilogue.
When we find a way to stand together in solidarity and embrace one another, to focus more on what unites us rather than what divides us, our world will know peace. When we finally realize that yes, that thing that's happening in that place to those people... well, it matters. It affects us. When we decide that our voices will be heard and that HEY, we have something important to say, we will hold our own, stand tall, and effect change in our world. At long last, the world will be ours again. Together.
"Love is the answer, at least for most of the questions in my heart. Like why are we here? And where do we go? And how come its so hard? It's not always easy, and sometimes life can be deceiving. I'll tell you one thing, its always better when we're together."
- Jack Johnson
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