December 25, 2017

in wonderful exhaustion

December 25, 2017/ Brandi Kellett

Merry Christmas.

I am so grateful for those of you who are with me on this journey to help us all expand our us. I am overwhelmed and thankful for words of encouragement, thoughtful interaction and a willingness to engage with perspectives that feel foreign, unsettling or offensive. Thanks for walking with me in our first 5 months!

I have spent the last week with family who think and speak and vote differently than me, and I marveled at our ability to love each other well. I hope that we can all share a common realization this week as we engage with people who see the world so differently than we do, and yet wish them a Merry Christmas as we ask them to pass the gravy We are actually very good at loving people we don't understand!

This Christmas week, I simply want to say thankyou, and that taking a moment in this holiday season to express gratitude is no small thing.

No essay this week, but I would love for you to read over all we have explored in the last few months.

Expand Your Us

We find our tribe. Our people. Soon, either intentionally or quite passively, we find ourselves divided into us and them. We cling to our “us,” moving toward them with empathy, greeting mistakes with compassion, going to bat for them, fighting their battles. We greet “them”, however, with skepticism, defining them by their mistakes, assuming the worst, and easily placing them into well-defined stereotypical boxes. Expand Your Us is my effort to confront this divide, to highlight the devastating effects of “us and them” thinking, and to suggest alternatives as we try to form a more perfect union. There is no them, there’s only us.