It's dark right now. But morning comes.

Last Wednesday I woke up to the news that Reverend Raphael Warnock won one of the U.S. Senate seats in Georgia. I asked Alexa to play the song Oh Happy Day as I was overjoyed. In the midst of a lot of darkness, there was light coming, and Reverend Warnock himself mentioned this in his acceptance speech.

We all know what happened later that day, which frankly made everything seem even darker than it already was, even though the evils that were on display that day are around us all the time.

I am not here to debate or to leave any room for doubt that what happened was demonic, disgusting, and domestic terrorism. It was violent white supremacy attacking our democracy. Let this sink in, the day after the first black senator from GA was elected, there was a confederate flag inside a noose erected outside our sacred nation’s capitol. It’s sickening.

Before I share what’s on my heart, I want to say something that my friend Lesley Graham addressed on Instagram about keeping our sides of the street clean, and I want to admit here that I haven’t always done that. I am not only passionate about issues related to social justice, and firmly believe those are rooted in and connected to my faith, but I have been personally triggered by the actions of Trump in many ways. Due to that, and the fact that I’m a human that makes mistakes, I have not always expressed my opinions and beliefs with love, and for that, I apologize.

I know that many people reading this don’t understand my political views, and right now I don’t have the bandwidth to unpack that, but I want to share something here as a challenge to white Christians specifically right now if you have the open-mind and willing heart to listen.

What hurt most to me, and I know it has hurt more individuals and groups who were targets of the racist and antisemitic actions and words, are the responses of white people, specifically white Christians. The refusal to explicitly state that what happened was wrong, the decency to shut down any notion of comparison to other events in our country, to gall to make it about censorship, the cowardness to hide behind a single issue instead of listening to the trauma and pain of others.

I made my decision on who to vote for solely on my own, without watching the news for four years.

After the election in 2016, my therapist recommended that I limit my news, because I was deeply upset by things I couldn’t control, and I took that so literally that I never watched the news for 4 years. I didn’t check it online, I didn’t click on links on social media, whatever.

I made my decision based on my own personal convictions rooted in my faith, my profession, and my eyes being opened over the past ten years to the pain and suffering and different perspectives of individuals who don’t look or think like me.

I didn’t sell out, I opened my eyes and my heart. I’m not being manipulated by the main-stream media, I chose to get my information from real people and stories and books and research. I’m not watering down my faith, I’m leaning into it with compassion and conviction and complexity.

Another thought on how we get our information that I’ve noticed is that we are all, regardless of perspective on this event, expecting instant information, and we are basing our opinions and ideas solely on what was shared immediately after or is getting the most attention. Be patient, listen to the stories of representatives that feared they would die that day. Honor the stories of the heroes who diverted mobs away from the Senate. Wait for context before making assumptions, and for the love, stop basing your ideas only on what others you follow on social media share. There is so much information about that day that hasn’t even been revealed yet because of safety.

There are so many good quotes from voices I respect this week on how we can’t have unity without accountability or justice, how we need to trust people when they speak about what threatens them, and that we cannot truly hope until we are willing to lament. I know I am not alone in my perspectives. Another gift is that I have had multiple friends this week reach out to me and say “I see now” “this event changed how I view things” and we have had the best discussions.

As Senator-elect Reverend Warnock said on this day last week, it’s dark, but morning comes. We can choose to be driven by fear and cling to the nationalism that we have been made to believe equals Christianity, or we can choose to be and direct others towards that light we believe in by advocating first for accountability and justice while examining the darkness in our own hearts.