Yesterday I watched a video post on Facebook by an Episcopal priest. Dressed in her uniform, you can’t see the tattoos on her arms and shoulders, and you have to look closely to see the scars from piercings. In the post called “Blessed are the Unemployed, Unimpressive, Underrepresented | Have a Little Faith,” Nadia Bolz-Weber sits in her church and recites a different version of the Beatitudes. Blessed are the…and she named so many ways people are marginalized in our society, and ways that these people bless us unknowingly. She starts out by saying, “Blessed are the agnostics.” She gets more and more close-to-home as she goes on.
We have all been misjudged somehow, and we have all misjudged. We see the outward appearance, forgetting that there is an inner truth that may not be so evident, so quickly. We misjudge ourselves, and put ourselves in little boxes that are really too small for us. We do it because it’s just easier that way. We don’t have to stop and think, or reach out beyond our own little bubble of existence to notice another in their bubble.
Maybe, “Stop, look and listen,” is for more than daisies along the roadside.
