While I Wait, I Hope
Part 3: The theme of Volume One and how it relates to healing for political communication
A place of refuge is more than a safe place where we can escape rejection and violence. When we are seeking refuge, we are seeking a place to thrive, a place where we know ourselves as beloved children of God, where we can relate to others without fear of retaliation, and where we can create a new life.
At peace with our own need for refuge, we can offer the same to those who have fled violence and oppression. The deeper our knowledge of abundant life and the freedom of the children of God becomes, the deeper our longing for these things becomes, too, and therefore our waiting grows more intense. Paradoxically, in this waiting we understand more fully our need for refuge. This internal shift marks the first movement towards political healing.
Every journal series we have published—and every journal entry we plan to include in Volume One—will be focused on political healing for work culture, communication, and personal well-being. These three areas match our three main core values of creativity, community, and contemplation, respectively.
Our hopes for healing in political communication are not vague abstractions unrelated to every day policy debates and decisions. As a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, we do not take positions on specific policy, but our objective through Volume One’s theme of Refuge: advocating for refugees, the displaced, and marginalized, is to demonstrate how the peace of Christ can heal political communication—including both our mindsets and the specific words we choose to relate those mindsets to others.
We hope to shift the paradigm from exclusion and fear to one of inclusion and hospitality by telling the stories of the displaced and how our well-being is tied to theirs. We hope to show that we need refugees, the displaced, and marginalized as much as they may need us, and we hope to break through the illusion that they live life as separate beings from us. A truer and more beautiful viewpoint is one that recognizes that they have the same ability to thrive as we do.
The stories we tell influence us and our culture, and as professionals in politics and government, it will be wise for us to reexamine how we construct those stories so that they fit into a greater gospel narrative that includes original goodness, distrust in God’s goodness, God’s goodness revealed by his participation in our suffering, and finally, the coming restoration of all things.
WEEKLY ACTION POINT:
Make a pledge to back the Kickstarter for Volume One.
Liberatus is a community journal about wholeness in politics, because all of us are tired of dysfunction. Citizens who join us are advocates for how the peace of Christ can remake politics from the ground up.
Journal Entry #114
ISSUE 017: VISIONEERING, PART 3