Now is the time for purposeful work.

How will we endure the next four-plus years and beyond? It’s a question that’s been on many hearts and minds since January 20th. If we've learned anything from our ancestors and mentors who came before us, it's that enduring, persisting, resisting, connecting, and thriving requires a commitment to intentionality and purpose.

On Inauguration Day last week, as an act of resistance, comfort and care, I spent time journaling with my dear friend Bina M Patel's book "Say the Quiet Part Out Loud". In this important book, Bina asserts: "The response to fear is not courage. It is purpose."

As I let that statement wash over me and my reflections that morning, I set an intention to focus on purpose in the days ahead. Specifically, I committed myself to: (1) looking for and sharing examples of people doing purposeful abolitionist work, and (2) reigniting, reconnecting with, and fulfilling my own sense of purpose in this world.

To be honest, spending time that afternoon journaling, dreaming, and drawing my visions for how my community could be one day felt replenishing, and I found that surprising. For me, it felt indulgent to be thinking, feeling, and sketching all the way through what communal conversations, mutual care, and restorative practices might look and feel like, how they might actually function in the future, and what might need to shift in order to get there.

Digging down into the specifics of my purpose-- what it is that I yearn to co-create and breathe life into with my family, neighbors, friends, and fellow community members-- honored the depths of the complexity and gravity of the time we're in. And it helped me actually see and feel the ways our current reality constrains our capacity to dream big about a different way for our world, much less act and implement accordingly.

I feel the need to stay here in this replenishment place for a moment. Because my experience on Monday was powerful, and stands in stark contrast to my past experiences-- times when I let myself focus solely on the problems, the injustices, the formidable challenges we are up against. Without realizing it, by focusing there, I had let myself become consumed and even neutralized by my grief and righteous anger about the systems we know are broken, ill-equipped, and harmful by design. I was giving away my power.

Of course, experiencing grief and anger are essential for the human spirit to move through, metabolize, and heal. But dwelling with grief and anger can cause us and our communities real anguish and despair-- harm-- by snuffing out the very flame that ignites and helps sustain our capacity to connect and build relationships with fellow humans, to co-create change, and to pursue our purpose in this world. We need to continually nourish ourselves and each other, to process and channel our grief and anger, so we can all interconnect and realize our dreams for a more caring and loving world. This won't happen by accident.

An example of a human doing purposeful, intentional work that feels important to share right now is The Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, who delivered a captivating sermon at the Washington National Cathedral as part of the presidential inauguration. In her sermon, Reverend Budde lifted up the foundational concept of unity, which, she asserted, hinges on dignity, honesty, and humility. She offered concrete examples of these concepts for her audience, and she personalized them. But, she didn't stop there.

Toward the end of her sermon, Budde was grounded into her purpose in that moment as she directly called upon the President "to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now ... some who fear for their lives.”

Budde named, described, and tied her audience, and their fear, humanity and dignity, to that of the very people the President has mocked, threatened, targeted, and victimized in words and deeds. She made plain the connection between humans who hold marginalized identities, humans who marginalize, and humans who are indifferent. She told the truth about those who have been victimized for centuries simply for being who they are. She related her plea as a humble child of God, and extended grace to every member of her audience by including us as fellow children of God-- fellow humans-- regardless of our religious affiliation or belief system.

In giving this particular sermon, on this particular day, at this particular moment, in this particular setting, to this particular audience, with the whole world watching and listening... Reverend Budde was grounded into her purpose when she spoke truth to power and said the quiet part out loud for all to hear. In her sermon, Budde presenced the universal nature of our humanity, and insisted on connecting us with it.

With deep gratitude, and after watching and listening through tears, I felt moved to share Budde's example of purposeful work as a reminder for us all.

To those of you whose eyes found this piece of writing here, and made it this far down the page, I send this purposeful prayer:

May you, and I, and all of us, find and live into our purpose for being here on this earth as spiritual beings having a human experience.

May we honor the dignity of each and every human being, by coming into real relationship with, truly seeing, and allowing ourselves to be seen by, those we meet.

May we honor the truth by speaking with honesty, and expecting the same of others.

May we walk the earth humbly by holding our and each others' hearts with tenderness.

May we practice gratitude for the capacity of the human heart to be broken, healed again and again and again, to continuously grow around the pain, and to become stronger each day.

May we find and create occasions to remain open to growing, changing, and breathing life into our deepest sense of purpose with intention, every single day of our lives, until we take our last breath.

May we one day come together, purposefully, in solidarity and unity.

** I cannot recommend Bina's deeply moving and influential book highly enough. When you purchase #SayTheQuietPartOutLoud on Bookshop.org you're prompted to choose a locally-owned bookstore of your choosing to receive a portion of the proceeds. It's also a way to shop small while shopping online, which helps all of us stop feeding the machine.