Love Is Always Breaking Down Barriers

​I had a three-hour conversation yesterday with a colleague-turned-friend named Negar. We’ve been working on a project together, but the real connection didn’t happen in the project, it happened in the pauses, in the stories, in connection.

Negar’s family immigrated to the U.S. from Iran when she was a little girl. She now lives in Dubai with her husband. They both still have family in Iran.

As we started our conversation, I could tell Negar was weary. She looked tired in our shared screen. She told me how she and her husband had been trying to stay connected with loved ones in Iran while the world around them feels increasingly uncertain. And how that connection gets more difficult to make by the day.

We talked about the fear and ache of watching from afar while violence, politics, and power struggles unfold dangerously close to the people you love. I confessed to her that in sixty years of living I have never for a second had to worry about war devouring the people I care most about.

I told her it is one of the things I understand least about God. How some of us will go through life never seeing a war, and yet some will grow up never escaping it. Or the haunting memories of it.

It’s easy - too easy - for war to feel like a headline when it doesn’t touch your circle. It can feel like someone else’s fight, someone else’s pain. Until you know someone. Until you hear their voice, and see the tiredness in their eyes, and realize that they are carrying the weight of the world in ways you've never had to.

It's quite the testimony that reading about wars and living in wars are two very different experiences.

Looking in Negar's eyes, I was reminded that wars are not just about countries. Not just about politics or alliances or blame. They are about people.

They are about one family, one mother, one uncle, one friend still trying to make a life in the middle of uncertainty.

They are about the children who wake up to the sound of fear - a fear that may very well accompany them the rest of their lives. The parents who don’t have good answers for that fear. The prayers whispered across time zones, hoping to keep someone safe without knowing how.

Knowing someone changes everything.

It softens the hard edges of opinion. It silences my need to pick the right side. It reminds me that humanity is never as black and white as a headline.

Headlines beg us to pick sides. But sometimes the side to pick is not a country or a cause, it’s compassion. It’s choosing to care, even when we don’t fully understand. It’s listening. It’s mourning what is lost, even if it what is lost was never ours.

I don’t pretend to understand the history or the politics of most wars. But I do understand friendship. I understand the sacredness of hearing someone’s heart. And maybe that was the sacred design of God bringing Negar into my life when he did.

Maybe God doesn't need me to understand why some grow up in war when others don't as much as he needs me to understand that his heart breaks with ours, no matter whose borders we stand behind.

It is often the breaking heart that is most open to love, and it is love that most often breaks down the barriers that keep us apart.

Not the least of those barriers: war.