This past Sunday at youth group we were delving deeper into Micah 6:8; focusing on mercy. We talked a bit about mercy as a group. In our discussion, the youth talked about mercy being uncommon in the world. In part, they related this to the fact that mercy can be seen as a weakness. When you show mercy, you open yourself up to someone taking advantage of that mercy. For me this was great because this theme tied in directly to the direction I wanted to go.
I shared the video from Brene Brown. A few things really jumped out to me in this talk:
1) Connection is the key to life.
2) Shame/fear of disconnection is the thing that completely unravels connection.
3) In order to have true connection with people, we have to be vulnerable.
4) The key to overcoming shame/being loved is feeling you are worthy of love.
5) We as a nation, try to numb the emotions we do not wish to experience through overspending, over eating, over medicating and abusing drugs/alcohol. The problem is you cannot selectively numb emotions. When you numb negative emotions (pain/fear/shame) you also numb the positive emotions (love/hope/peace).
It's twenty minutes but