The other day I read this wonderful article about a baby who was born because of a uterus transplant. Yes, you read that right. Medical science has now figured out how transplant a uterus into another woman's body. This gives so many women who have lost their uterus for various reasons a new hope. This surgery is still in its early trial stages, and the success rate is not high at all, but it is progress. It is hope. And I celebrate it, as I celebrate any progress in the science of infertility, because it gives me and other infertile women hope that someday infertility can be a thing of the past.
I am a believer that God gives us the ability to discover new medical technologies to do His work here on Earth. Both my husband and I do not believe that faith and science have to be mutually exclusive. God can work miracles through medical science. I have seen it over and over again. I am a living testimony to the wonders of medical science and, hopefully some day soon, so will be my children. Reading articles like this give me so much hope for the future. What a beautiful thing to be able to give women the gift of producing new life! It was a wonderfully beautiful article.
And then I made a mistake. I read the comments.
So much hate. So much judgement. The comments were bile, angry, full of some of the most awful things I've ever heard. I won't repeat the comments, because they are too awful to bear repeating. The happy tears that had begun to fall reading the article quickly turned to painful tears. Perfect strangers throwing awful words and awful comments towards each other. People who thought that others were selfish for wanting children, that they should be more worried about other problems in the world, that they weren't justified in their feelings of despair at not being able to have children. I felt personally attacked.
At one point, I started to write a response to one of the comments. I got a few sentences in and then I thought, what am I doing? Why am I adding fuel to the fire? These people don't know me nor do I know them. It's not worth it. So I erased it, closed the page, and moved on. But I just couldn't shake how hateful and hurtful these people were to others who are going through a very difficult time.
Here's the point: Everyone is fighting something. Everyone has a battle raging inside of them. Everyone has different priorities and different ways they go about things and different beliefs. What may be important to you may not be important to someone else. That does not make your battle unjustified nor anyone else's. We all have inner demons we fight, and we all handle them differently. When did we become a society that cannot tolerate people with different ideas and values? When did it become ok to sit behind a computer screen and type bile comments to strangers and call them harsh names?
I could write a whole other series of blogs on why our society is the way it is. But I will say one thing here...our society is lacking a whole lot of COMPASSION. People have become so consumed with themselves that they have stopped LISTENING. I have two friends who started a non-profit organization simply because they saw a need for "compassionate listening" in our world. And sometimes, all someone needs is an ear to listen. Those ears are hard to come by these days.
Mom was right. If you have nothing nice to say, don't say it at all.
If you wouldn't say it to their face, don't type it in a comment on an article, or on Facebook, or Twitter, or anywhere else in cyber world. And if it's mean and you would say it to their face, you should probably reconsider whether it should be said at all. Because as momma said, some things are better left unsaid.
Put yourself in their shoes. If you were fighting a hopeless battle, would you want to hear all those hateful things from people who didn't understand? Definitely not. Be gracious, be compassionate. Someday you might need someone to be compassionate towards you. Chances are, if you weren't compassionate towards someone in their time of need they aren't going to return the favor.
Protect yourself (and your heart and your soul) from the naysayers. If you have people in your life that are constantly ridiculing you, questioning your lifestyle or motives, etc., it may be time to distance yourself from them. I have unfollower, defriended, and blocked many people on social media because I just can't handle their negativity. I am better off not having those types of people in my life. I still love them, I still pray for them, but sometimes it is just better to step away from the toxic people in your life. You will be better for it.
Do yourself a favor and take a break from technology once in awhile. I am a lover of all kinds of technology (my house is full of all kinds of iStuff), but I have come to realize that I need a break from it from time to time. It is addicting to me, and it is a great time waster! I don't know what it is about technology, but it does things to us. It turns us into people we aren't. I've been doing this thing where I spend the first hour of the day and the last hour before I go to bed unplugged. No phone, no iPad, no computer or TV. I take that time to read a book (yes an actual book!) or journal or spend time with God. Is it hard? Yup. Do I do it every day? Nope. But the days I do start and/or finish my day unplugged are wonderful. I am more productive, I sleep better, and I actually stay off technology more throughout the day. Facebook will go on without you, I promise. There will be plenty of drama to read later.
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When I was a young girl, and I would complain about something, my grandmother would always tell me "no matter how hard things get for you, there is always someone else somewhere in the world who has it worse than you." Smart woman that old lady is. She is a genuinely compassionate, generous person with a heart for helping people, always putting others before herself. She never talks bad about someone, even if they're someone that irritates her. She always looks for the good in people. I would love to have a world full of people like my grandmother with compassionate hearts. Our world would be so much better. Instead, we have a world full of self-centered people who measure their self-worth by Facebook likes and have no problem calling perfect strangers awful names. I am glad my grandmother will never see the world of Facebook, because it would break her heart to see what society has really become.
