They should have killed me when they had the chance!!

If you’re gonna shoot your shot—shoot straight. There is something to be said for when focus meets commitment. It’s a rarity to not be distracted by this disaster, that atrocity, or the video footage of both happening at once. Because it’s so tempting. Especially when it seems that the “low hanging fruit” has solutions that won’t mandate we wait 6 months before we can bake a cake. Hell—we’re hungry now!! Or even better, why not just pick the apples off the ground, right? It’s already fallen and that requires zero reaching upwards. We could bake a cake within the hour!! But can we pause for a minute and ask ourselves, “How would that taste?”

So is it with the initiatives and projects many of us begin with on a quarterly basis. Oftentimes we get so caught up with achieving results today that we neglect to count the cost of a work done too quickly. Not considering the sickness that comes with making pies from dirty apples. But can I lose the analogy for a bit? Why is it really that we are so easily distracted? Why is it that just a little bit of glitter can have us giving up on gold? (I guess I’m worse at putting aside metaphors than I thought.) Is it—perhaps, that part of us wonders if it’s really worth all the work? All the late nights, the fasting & praying, the tears, the self-discipline, the brutal work, the patience. What if none of them are actually going to be worth it? I wonder if the reason we are so quick to give up or get distracted isn’t because there is a part of us secretly thinking, “It’ll all fail anyway, but at least I can walk away with *something* accomplished.”

But what if the only thing keeping it from working is the fact that so many of us keep giving into that thought? What if the problem isn’t that no one listens to the radicals, but that the “radicals” aren’t radical enough to actually BELIEVE it can work? What if we are simply finding more security in our problems than in our progress? Because these problems sent by our enemies are things we know how to keep from killing us. Meanwhile, life without them is a wild card—something we’ve never experienced before. What if our oppressors were right all along? What if we can’t handle our freedom?

Are these thoughts winning in the battle for our minds so much so that we have nothing left with which to fight for our souls?

Hmmm….can I make a recommendation?

Let’s just shoot our shots. Let’s look forward, arms swinging, legs pumping, eyes focused. Let’s not slow down. Let’s not look back. Let’s be so engrossed in our work that we remove all room to discuss “if it fails.” Let’s be so committed to its success that it only fails over all (not one) of our dead bodies. So that as long as there is breath in any of our lungs, we’re all still breathing. Let’s be so connected to one another that they can push on 50 million of us at once and not one of us fall.

It’s a lot, I know. It’s terrifying. But I, for one, can no longer accept that there is anything we cannot change. You see, they’ve tried to kill me already. They did everything they could to take me out. And their shots made contact—internally and externally. But somehow they missed their target and didn’t quite get to my heart. They could only hit me at an angle and now I’m still breathing. What a mistake they made. Because in their attempt to take my life the only thing they actually managed to remove was my fear.

So dare to be radical with me—for real. They’ve already taken away the authenticity that made everything else valuable. So at this point, we really do have nothing to lose but our chains.

#ForwardTOGETHER, Not ONE step back.

Katrina Marie