The other women are cooing with inspiration tonight, thankful and blessed in their pastel smiles, but I’m a whirling wind of anger that won’t settle. I want it to settle: it’s hot in my ribcage, a sizzling itch, but I am stuck with it. This one isn’t worth it, I tell myself. Didn’t I tell my students to choose their battles? But it’s not the issue at hand that hurts so much; it’s the buildup. How many slaps to the face can you take before you’re no longer laughing?

I don’t know where to stand anymore. In the rearview mirror, I see a girl who always chose forgiveness and kindness and love. She’s still the person I want to be, but I can’t reach her; some days, it feels like she’s long dead and decayed into a zombie whose best smile comes out as a snarl. But when I flex the mirror a different direction, that girl looks a lot less glamorous. She was incompetent, codependent, often flinching away from hard truths. She didn’t know how to stand up for herself. She could be sickeningly weak.

And maybe that’s what I push back against now. I don’t think it’s cute to airbrush on blithe little quotes about a love that you don’t understand when in reality you’re choosing compliance over conviction because you’re desperate for approval. I don’t think it’s kind or sweet to go along with a lie. I cannot respect cowardice or ego disguised as service of the public good; I’m uninterested in meaningless repetitions of pop catchphrases. Nothing is remotely inspirational unless it is first bone-deep true and transparent to its core, and that often involves a good deal of grit. As my friend Melody once said, “I like my friends a little grumpy.” If you cannot name and rebuke the darkness, then you have no right to pretend you know a thing about light.

Tonight, I am angry, but I don’t want this to be my permanent state. I mull over forgiveness and how much harder it sounds these days. All I can cling to is that its power comes from its being a choice; I can look you in the eye, recognize what you are doing as wrong—and yes, I can say so—and then, I have the right to choose to forgive you, knowing full well that you don’t deserve it. There is power in that, I think. This isn’t roll-over-dead submission or shrinking away like the fake forgiveness they try to string around a whimsy little heart-shaped necklace, a denial of frustration or of pain. This means recognizing the truth for what it is and then refusing to let others’ sins and abuses dictate my emotions or my heart before the Lord. It is, in its own way, a form of resistance: I may speak up when it’s right, and I may hold out when it’s important, but you may not hold my spirit captive or take my heart away from me.

Ain’t gonna happen. I’m not stooping to your level; I won’t let the bitterness drown out mercy and justice. I release you to Jesus and pray goodness over your life, though my emotions may not yet be on the same page as my prayers. I have to keep refusing hatred as stubbornly as I refuse to be controlled.

It’s wrong it’s wrong it’s wrong it’s wrong. But I don’t need to be the one to fix it, to fix you. The God of vengeance, the God of grace will always take up my case, and He’ll bring down the gavel exactly where it needs to land at the cataclysmic end of time. In the meantime, I know the truth and I hold the truth and I speak the truth and do not flinch away from it, even if it makes me less popular and less understood than the softer women with their too-white lace. I hold the truth and I speak the truth, and I set you free and wish you grace, both at the same time.

Goodness and grace to wear down your anger until only compassion remains.
Goodness and grace to bless you with wellness in body and soul.
Goodness and grace to grow you up.
Goodness and grace where you least expect it and deserve it even less.

I can’t say tonight if I’ll end up pushing back or not, because I don’t know how far you’re going to try to invade. I don’t know where my prayers will lead me, what my Lord will say, how much land I can surrender or which borders I simply must defend. But Jesus, help me speak up for them if I must with goodness and grace, with every person’s dignity and infinite value ever present before me. “Who am I to touch the Lord’s anointed?” the psalmist asked, respectful of his own would-be murderer.

I’m bloodier and uglier than the other women, but arrows in my fists and scars on my hands, I’m setting you free instead of striking out for revenge. You won’t love me for it; no one will sing my praises. I will simply watch you skitter away until the thin moon takes your place, and I will watch it in the stillness, and somewhere you can’t reach me I will hear the voice of God.