Silence is Not a Fruit of the Spirit

There are seasons when silence feels like wisdom. And then there are seasons when silence starts to feel like agreement.

This is the second kind.

I have tried to stay quiet. I told myself that restraint was love, that waiting was discernment, that maybe this was not my place to speak. I prayed for clarity and hoped the urgency would soften if I gave it enough time.

It did not.

Because silence, right now, is doing something very specific. It is creating room for fear to harden into policy. It is allowing violence to be justified with language that sounds official and reasonable and even righteous. It is letting faith be bent into something that looks less like Jesus and more like power wearing Scripture as armor.

And that is not something I can quietly coexist with anymore.

People are afraid.

Not in a performative way and not in a way that lives online. This is the kind of fear that settles into the body. It changes how you drive and where you go and whether you answer the door. It changes how visible you allow yourself to be in public spaces.

That fear is especially heavy for our friends of color and our immigrant neighbors. For families who have done nothing except work, love, raise children, and try to stay unnoticed enough to survive.

When people start using words like civil war, I do not hear hysteria. I hear pattern recognition. I hear communities who recognize what happens when rhetoric sharpens, when language dehumanizes, when leaders begin speaking about human lives as acceptable losses.

And this is not theoretical for me. This is not something happening somewhere else.

This is impacting my family.

It impacts my family and friends who are a part of the LGBTQ+ community, people who have lived their lives loving quietly, faithfully, without spectacle, only to be told once again that who they are is something up for debate. It impacts my sisters and my best friends whose brown skin has always made them visible in ways they did not choose. It impacts people I love deeply whose faith does not fit inside the narrow, weaponized version of Jesus being used right now, which is especially painful because it looks nothing like Christ.

These are not abstract groups to me. These are the people who raised me, shaped me, held me, and walked with me. When policies and rhetoric start to treat their existence as suspect or conditional, this stops being something I can watch from a distance.

I also know where I stand in all of this. I am protected in ways many people I love are not. I move through the world with ease. I am listened to. I am believed. I am not afraid when I walk into a room. I do not worry about being safe, about being fed, about being seen as fully human before I ever open my mouth.

And because of that, I cannot be quiet anymore.

Because when someone like me stays silent, it is not humility. It is hiding. It is using my safety as a shelter meant only for myself, instead of standing in front of the people I love when they need cover.

Because we are watching something unsettling happen in public.

We are watching people die. We are watching violence carried out by the state and justified by it. We are watching deaths explained away, defended, reframed as necessary or inevitable. We are watching political leaders speak about force and death with alarming ease.

And we are watching people we know and respect agree.

That contrast matters.

I am not a legal expert. I am not pretending to be one. But I do know what our country claims to stand for, because it is written plainly.

Our Constitution speaks about due process. It speaks about protections for persons, not just citizens. Our laws, at least on paper, are meant to limit power, not excuse it. Immigration law itself acknowledges asylum and protection for people fleeing harm.

And yet what we are seeing in practice often looks very different.

We see people detained for long periods with little clarity. We see families separated. We see force used and defended. We see fear intentionally amplified as a tool. We see death spoken about casually, as if it is an acceptable consequence rather than a moral failure.

Even without legal training, the disconnect is obvious.

Scripture gives language to this without overcomplicating it.

Isaiah warns about unjust laws and oppressive decrees. Deuteronomy commands the pursuit of justice. Again and again, the Bible reminds us that systems can follow rules and still violate what is right.

Jesus did not confuse law with righteousness.

He healed when it was forbidden. He touched those society avoided. And when a woman was brought before Him to be executed according to the law, He stopped it.

He placed Himself between violence and a human life. A legal death. A justified death. A socially approved death.

He said no.

That is the Jesus I recognize.

It should be possible to say this clearly and honestly.

It is okay to believe in laws. It is okay to believe in borders. It is okay to care about safety and structure.

It is also necessary to say that what we are seeing is not okay.

When violence is normalized, when death is justified publicly, when fear is used intentionally, something has gone very wrong.

Genesis tells us that every human being is made in the image of God. Every one.

When human life becomes expendable in service of order or ideology, something sacred has been violated.

And when Christians excuse it, something sacred has been abandoned.

This is where many of us live.

Not on the extremes. Not pretending this is simple. Living in the middle, where nuance exists and tension remains.

I believe the middle is exactly where responsibility now sits.

The middle is not neutral ground. It never has been. The middle is where people still have access and influence and relationships on all sides. It is where silence feels safest, which is exactly why it costs the most.

Scripture is clear that knowing and doing nothing is not neutrality. It is participation.

So how do we keep doing life while all of this is happening?

How do we keep planning weddings and packing lunches and planting gardens and laughing with friends without becoming numb or cynical or complicit?

We do it by staying present. By staying honest. By refusing despair without pretending away reality. By allowing joy and grief to exist together.

Hope is not denial. Hope is disciplined love.

We do not all need to become experts. We do not need to shout. We do not need perfectly crafted arguments.

We need people who are willing to speak when silence would be easier. People who ask better questions at dinner tables. People who raise children who know that kindness is not weakness. People who choose neighbors over narratives. People who show up in small, faithful ways that add up.

Sometimes it looks like voting. Sometimes it looks like giving. Sometimes it looks like protecting someone quietly. Sometimes it looks like saying out loud that something feels wrong even when it makes the room uncomfortable.

Sometimes it looks like planting flowers anyway.

Not because everything is fine, but because beauty reminds us what we are trying to protect.

This is not a call to extremism.

It is a call to integrity.

To those of us in the middle, the thoughtful ones, the careful ones, the ones who see complexity, this is the moment to stand anyway. To speak anyway. To love loudly enough that silence no longer shelters harm.

We keep doing life. We keep choosing love. We keep telling the truth.

Because silence is no longer an option. Not because we are angry, but because we are awake.

And because Jesus has never been unclear about where He stands.