Since my junior year of college, I have questioned my faith, my values, and the Church. I struggled to find something tangible and true to grasp onto in the midst of repetitive chapel worship services with dimmed lights and students all around me with their hands raised in the air, and speakers presenting conflicting messages to which my ears had become deaf. I found myself increasingly hardened in reaction to many chapel and church services, which was only accelerated by the toxic tidal wave of the 2016 election that crashed over me daily in the news and on social media.
My spiritual life shifted as I became more jaded, and I had to reconfigure how I could find God daily when my practiced routines ran dry. When I picked up my journal to write out prayers like I did every morning, I couldn’t find any words that felt genuine or worthwhile. So I just didn’t. I temporarily stopped reading my Bible, and I looked for spiritual experiences anywhere else I could find them—creative nonfiction books, poetry, equally disillusioned peers.
At the same time, I found myself more affirmed about social justice and advocacy than ever before, and I knew the affirmation was spiritual. I did what many of us did, Christians and non-Christians alike: I fueled my internal fire on Facebook, quick to defend my beliefs in comment threads, and I vented to my like-minded friends, angrier and more confused with every fresh argument and news article.
November 9, the morning after the election, still in bed, I scrolled through Facebook posts and news articles on my iPhone in disbelief. I was groggy from staying up too late to try to catch the results before finally giving up, so I had little reaction other than disappointment. Then halfway through my first class, my professor left the room, unable to control her tears; my own heart pulsed with a dull ache. On the walk to chapel, I hoped for a solemn environment, allowing me and other students some room to mourn, but the band played upbeat songs and the students clapped along while I sank into my seat in the balcony. Throughout the day, I found myself in a state of grief, and tears spilled over the border of my eyelids in twos or threes or fifteens as we read “I, Too, Sing America” by Langston Hughes and as I watched President Obama’s address following the election. By the time I gathered at English dinner friends with friends and a professor in my major, I could do little more than tell them, “Guys, I’m so sad,” before resting my head on the cafeteria table to cry again.
But it was verbal processing with my loving, understanding friends and classmates and professors that helped me to recover to a state of hope and action and trying again. It was laughing about the ridiculousness of it all over soup and truffles and frequently asking each other how each of us was doing, and meaning it. It was reading Anne Lamott and writing about my own struggles with spirituality that gave me the push I needed to begin my routines again, to figure out how to reconnect, to reconfigure, to find God and hope again.
Courageous conversations like these matter because they open dialogue and offer valuable perspectives. We have to talk about the difficult, painful, and crushing experiences in our lives and in the lives of those around us, or we miss the opportunity to grow and create awareness. I’m guilty of skirting around certain topics when I know the person I’m talking to doesn’t have the same viewpoint as me, and that doesn’t help either of us, because it keeps us from understanding one another better.
Whether the courageous conversations we have are about emotional abuse, racism, sexism, relationships, addiction, etc., whatever courageous conversations means to you, just have them. Start in the beginning or in the middle, gently or all at once. Create art, write an essay or a poem, have a meal with someone who has different viewpoints than you, participate in a march—it doesn’t matter, just figure out what matters to you, where you see hurt and injustice, where you want to see change, and begin talking about it.
Shelbi Favre is a senior English and Writing major at Indiana Wesleyan University. Her dream job is to work as an editor for a book publishing company or magazine. In her free time, she enjoys building her library, cooking, and singing off-key.