Grit and Grace

Jessie Dye is Earth Ministry's Senior Campaign Strategist. She wrote this piece as a reflection on the new year and the new challenges and opportunities it brings. If you would like to receive reflections and updates about Earth Ministry/WAIPL programs directly to your inbox, you can sign up for our email newsletter on our website.

Beloved Community,

The week after New Year’s Day is the most difficult of the working year. In the Northwest, we are in full hibernation mode during the weeks just past the winter solstice, our darkest season. The music, lights, and reunions of the mid-winter holiday are behind us. Nature lies bare with only the tiniest hint of the daffodils to come.

Facing the demands of this new year is formidable as well. In 2017, we confronted and fought our way through horrific environmental decisions made by the current presidential administration – the cannibalizing of our public lands, plummeting US global leadership on climate, and the gutting of the EPA. Attacks on the poor, the ill, and the immigrant are increasing and hate speech is no longer seen by some as shameful. Rising to the challenges of 2018 daunts our most resolute activists.

At Earth Ministry/WAIPL, we pledge ourselves to grit and grace this year.

Grit, because we are in it for the long run and serious obstacles are part of the landscape.

Grace, because it is only with kindness, love, and the presence of Spirit that we are able to reach across the rifts that divide us, here and around the world.

How can we act with grit and grace when our democracy, our heritage, and our children’s future are being robbed in plain sight? Gratitude for each other takes us a long way there, as does compassion for the angry ones, and honest pride in the remarkable successes we’ve accomplished together.

Image: Patrick Wilson on Flickr

This year, we celebrated many victories. Thanks to our shared efforts, decision-makers denied permits needed to build the coal terminal in Longview and have ordered a more in-depth review process for a methanol refinery in Kalama. We expanded the Children's Safe Product Act, ensuring that parents can protect their children from harmful toxic chemicals. And due to public outcry, both the City of Tacoma and Whatcom County paused construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure projects in those communities. 

Gratitude goes first to the Native Nations of our region and across the country. Thanks to the Lummi, Quinault, Yakima, Nimiipuu, and Upper Columbia Tribes as well as many others, we have fought terrible fossil fuel projects in the Northwest and won! This beautiful video tells part of the story.

Gratitude extends to our environmental partners, who have open-heartedly welcomed faith leadership into their circles and shared their policy wisdom and resources with us. We are all so much stronger together.

Earth Ministry is particularly grateful to each one of you who said a prayer, preached a sermon, picked up the phone, submitted a comment, attended a hearing, sent a check, made a monthly donation, talked with your family, and sent in a ballot in the last year. Take pride in the good work we have done together. It takes a powerful movement to protect creation, and you are at the forefront of it!

Finally, showing compassion for those who are terrified of change is a powerful moral and strategic lesson from the Civil Rights Movement. In a fast changing world, our kindness is our greatest strength and builds the social bonds we require for a civil society and for long-term care for our common home.

In 2018, Earth Ministry has an absolute commitment to you that we will find the right messages, provide strong leadership, and maintain the stick-to-itiveness necessary to get us though this year with grit and grace. We count on your grit and grace as our beloved partners in the coming journey around the sun.

Blessings to you in the new year,

Jessie