2021 is a year of tremendous opportunity for you. While everyone is lamenting how challenging the last year has been, you should be gearing up to stretch yourself to take a risk.

There is another way. You can rise above. You must figure out how to do it ASAP.

TODAY is the day to begin rising above the chaos and the vitriol that threatens to undo the good work of our institutions.

YOU must lead. You must become the bigger person. You must refuse to be dragged down to despising your attackers. When they go low, you must go high.

Please don’t stop dreaming big dreams, God-sized ones.

But don’t allow the love of your dream to make earth a living hell for everyone else. No dream is so great that it turns a neighbor, a spouse, or even a child into an enemy.

Leaders face constant pressure to respond to the 24 hour news and social media cycle. This can be exhausting to manage.

The cycle offers endless material for media consumers to digest: school shootings, leadership scandals, outlandish statements and behavior by political leaders and celebrities, botched police incidents, blatant examples of racism, and the list goes on. In addition, people within my own network are reporting personal news (marriages, divorces, births, deaths, new jobs, job losses, etc).

Peacekeeping is exhausting because it requires constant avoidance of problems, calculating the cost of missteps, and manipulating circumstances to keep warring groups from fighting. Peacekeepers try to keep the temperature down while anger and bitterness is boiling due to unresolved issues. At some point unresolved tensions will blow up. The peacekeeping leader knows this and it causes a great deal of stress to prolong the explosion.

Exhausted, beat up, despairing leaders should be a cause of deep concern for our communities. These leaders are the people who are guiding the institutions that have held our fragile bonds together. If our leaders are all looking for a way out it means they are not energetically building the very institutions our children will need to prosper. Further, they are not fueled to fend off the attacks happening at the foundational level of their organizations.

At the root of these retorts is one massive problem: the refusal to listen. A deaf ear is a particularly poisonous evil. It robs our neighbor of the dignity as an image bearer of God to be a bearer of truth. A deaf ear voids our neighbor’s experience. Refusal to consider your neighbor’s perspective means you believe they are a liar.

It is a high probability that anyone reading this has little interest in hearing more about COVID-19. The quarantines, job and business losses, mental health struggles, and waves of deaths have cast a long shadow over all of us. One might call this a tempting season to “lose heart.”

How can we resist the tendency to lose heart in this difficult time?

And as we stumble along as a nation, as it feels like our prayers are hindered, that prayer is not working, that we should give up and wage war as the world does, I pray God might continue to drive us to our knees. Our help is in you alone O Lord.

This picture of Vice President Kamala Harris as a young girl reminds me that she was a little girl, like many of our K-12 students of color, who had big dreams. Who would have imagined back then that the United States might one day have a female of color as a Vice President?

Will Christians stand with Jesus in bringing life to the world, or will we go down with a destructive political machine that is leading our nation to division, disaster, and the death of our great nation?

As a minister, I have often witnessed the families and friends of the dead honor, gush, and even weepingly recall the goodness of their now deceased loved ones. Why do we wait to honor those we love until they are not alive to hear it?