I find it to be true.

Everyone is broken.


I mean that.

We all have something that incompletes us. That took away the pieces and left us hurt.

It's not my right to know what wounds you: is it? But it is your responsibility to not hurt me. Because someone else hurt you.


I remember how I felt when I sat there. Dirty on the inside. Like a spectator sport-- we were watching the determination of a man's death.

Talking about why he should be "put down." Like a dog that had bit someone one too many times.

We knew he behaved wrongfully and in an egregious way. He killed a woman. Right after he raped her. She was his boss.

So he should die.

But what we didn't know before that moment was that he was raped from the time he was four. While I had a mother that would sacrifice her life for me and showed me how to love. While I had a father that held my hand and called my pumpkin and princess.

This man was prostituted out for drugs at the age of four. He knew no love. He was sent to foster care where he was treated like a foreigner in his own land and further sexually abused. He ran to the streets. A life of crime and illicit homosexual activity followed.

I still remember the way my face felt as I heard these stories. tight.

I wanted to cry. Sitting there working for the prosecutor's office. Collecting a pay check from the state. I did not want this man to die for his sins. I was silently against the death penalty. Do you know that feeling of pain that shoots up your face in fear?

The whole 4 hours. I felt this way. A panic that my job was going to put a man in need of love to death. Without ever knowing that a normal mother loves him.

I know it all sounds so incredibly cliche. but it is. life is cliche. It's a stack of proverbs to be followed. a list of little cliches that make you angry because you don't want to be stuck with the burden they possess.

There is a burden with truth.

Our true identity is to love without fear and insecurity. Our higher potential finds us when we set our course in that direction. The power of love and compassion transforms insecurity.