A Different Kind of Power

I know you are tired. I know you will not say it out loud because saying it out loud feels like a betrayal of everyone who cannot afford to be tired, everyone whose exhaustion is permanent and has no bed to return to. So you keep the tiredness hidden, even from yourself, and you feed the fire instead, because the fire at least feels like doing something, feels like the only response that has any dignity left in it.

I am not going to ask you to put the fire down. I would not insult you that way. I know where that fire came from. I know the faces it is burning for. And I want to say, before I say anything else, that what you feel is not wrong. The anger is not a mistake. The love underneath it is the most important thing about you. Anyone who asks you to simply calm down, to be reasonable, to see the other side, does not understand what they are asking. They are asking you to care less. And you cannot care less. You do not know how. That is not your failing. That is your greatness.

But I need to tell you something, and I need you to hear it not as an attack and not as a surrender. The fire, if that is all there is, will burn you from the inside before it produces anything lasting on the outside. It may win a moment. It may force a temporary concession. But nothing permanent is ever built from rage. This is not a theory. This is what I have watched happen to people I loved. The oppressor fails to break them, and then the hatred does what the oppressor could not. It moves in. It becomes the furniture of the interior. And slowly the person who began with a heart full of love becomes a person full of something else. Still certain. Still loud. But no longer luminous. And the cause loses the one thing that could not be manufactured by strategy or numbers or the correct position.

You did not fall in love with justice because you wanted to win an argument. You fell in love with it because you saw something that should not exist in a world made by God, and it broke something open in you.

Guard that place. Not from the enemy outside. From the hatred that comes in through the wound the enemy made, that presents itself as righteous, that feels like strength, that is in fact the most dangerous thing that can happen to a person who started out wanting to heal the world.

Because resistance is always, by its nature, a response. It is defined by what it opposes, shaped by what it hates, moving always in reaction to what the enemy does next. And you cannot defeat darkness on its own terrain. It will either make you like itself, or it will go darker, and you will spend your life one step behind, matching it blow for blow, and calling that justice. I have seen this. It does not end well.

The ones who actually changed something did not fight the darkness. They brought a light the darkness had no answer for. Not a light born from anger, but a light from beyond this world entirely. They were not resisting. They were guiding. One hand in the darkness, one hand holding the light, pulling people toward a different world.

That is what you have in you, before the anger, before the grief taught you that love was not enough. It was always enough. It is the only thing that has ever been enough. Protect it. Not for your sake only, though for your sake also. They can match your fire. They cannot match your light.