When you wake up in a world that you don’t want, what do you do?

Getting out of bed is a good start. I’m a coffee girl, but maybe you have a different initial ritual of choice. At some point, eating will be good for your body. Putting clothes on, and getting going with your day is another thing.

The world I don’t want feels so huge and crushing for my ability to alter it. I can rearrange the furniture in my living room, call my loved ones, and donate money. I can choose to greet every person I see with a smile on my face. There are things I cannot do, at least not on my own. The world I don’t want happened despite doing what I could do to create something different. Not all our ventures are successes.

The internet is full of stories of people whose lives are uprooted in ways that mine has not been yet. Those tales haunt me. Governments casually wielding death the way the postman carries the mail, discarding diplomacy for power because they only see the world through the scope of weapons. The view is narrow. The outcome destructive. It seems inevitable to anyone who steps back.

Around the time when I started to understand that God, as I’d been exposed to him in the religion I grew up in, was more likely human creation than fact, the world became much, much darker. All the children that starved simply died. All the evil never saw retribution. Death comes for us all, and takes us. Being a victim of difficult circumstances wouldn’t be evened out with the righteous going to Heaven. The brutality of the world felt more important, because the only ones that could combat it are us.

I eventually found and embraced Unitarian Universalism because it does not ask me to believe things that can’t be proven, or that has more evidence suggesting it’s wrong. It took me longer to understand that faith’s call to community and intentional relationship; that feels true too. Our values and our action matters: the only way things change is if we do something about it.

It’ll take a lot of “something,” over and over again.

The full world is beyond any of our arms’ reach. It is together that we’ll change things. When you wake up in a world you do not want, do not despair. Focus your intentions. Get up. Keep moving.