justice

LIFT UP: Women’s Empowerment Lesson 2

~ Georgia Coats ~ 5 Comments

I have been on a significant journey towards understanding Women’s Empowerment within me:

🌀 Lesson 1: the self discipline to GET UP—even when it’s hard

🌀 Lesson 2: the love to LIFT UP

🌀 Lesson 3: the power to RISE UP

This is my second lesson…

If humility is learning to live for the sake of others, then I needed to move on from my preoccupation with falling and failing—and the differences between them—and focus on the art of lifting.

Empowered Women Lift Each Other Up

I was still sore about potentially putting women at risk of COVID-19 instead of figuring out how to empower them.  So, I dove into another challenge with just the right amount of overwhelming and satisfying.  I was learning to be a Community Navigator at our local Immigrant and Refugee Center. 

I loved those words.  I really wanted to grasp the essence of community.  And I was already a horrible navigator of physical streets, but the thought of learning how to help resettling refugees navigate my beloved community felt like the perfect challenge.

Turns out Part Time Community Navigator is the perfect journey of learning to live for the sake of others.  Hours of filling out forms that will hopefully remove just one of a gazillion impossible barriers that newcomers face as they bravely transition to a new world, in a new language, with limited resources.  Turns out delving into the vulnerable circumstances of people’s lives, loved ones, and longings in order to fill out spaces on a form felt something like washing other people’s feet.

As a person who slips comfortably into a place of mercy, justice feels difficult to maneuver around in. This is precisely why I owned sparkly combat boots—to embrace a new aspect of myself.  In this new navigator role I was barely scratching the surface of understanding injustice and privilege as I listened repeatedly to the monotonous melodies of WAITING ON HOLD with one government office or another on behalf of a client and their specific need.  And every time a client got one step closer to their goal, I would lift my hands up in a celebratory cheer.  Turns out that mercy, grace, and kindness towards someone facing injustice can really split a heart wide open.  And when that happens, boundaries and zoning areas of comfort and capacity explode into beautiful chaos.  

Turns out that:

Mercy pairs with justice.

Gentleness is a form of harnessed power.

Grace pours out of abundance.

I was learning to lift others up.  I was learning to celebrate the big and small wins of many courageous people who welcomed me into their vulnerable spaces.

LIFT UP:  

My second lesson in being empowered is learning to help someone else reach their goals.  And… inviting others into reaching my own—the things we can’t do just on our own.  Carrying each other’s heavy loads, together.

I love grammar and words and the linguistic study of Semantics.  Some verbs require an agent:

Example: My friends and I carried the couch up the stairs.  

My friends and I are the agents in this sentence.  The couch was acted upon.  My friends and I used our strength and decision-making skills to complete a goal together.  That’s agency, and heavy lifting.  That involves me putting down my own important stuff for a moment so I can put all my strength into lifting something that requires many hands.

Strength is limited. We can’t do heavy lifting alone or for long.  We need to know that lifting is getting us somewhere—that there’s an end goal. 

So many dear people have lifted me upwards over the years.  And lifting others up is a privilege of loving and being loved.

Rising Above

~ Georgia Coats ~ 3 Comments

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.  MLK, Jr.

I’m not sure if I’m haunted or inspired.  

  • 20 years and I’m still trying to figure out living.
  • 20 years since my leukemia diagnosis in September of 2000.
  • 20 years of grasping at my sense of self in the midst of chronic limitations. 
  • 20 years of a tenacious spirit learning to dance in fragile body.

How can I rise above my personal cancer and be a part of treating malignancies that face all humanity?

This question has been weighing on my mind since last September.  I needed to rise up for my journey of Chronic Hope in order to clarify my identity.  

20 years later, there is clarity to rise.  But rising above is not a climb.  

It’s a descent. 

My challenge, quarantined in 2020, has been to listen, lament, and repent of injustice in myself and in our culture.  To weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn.  I really wanted to just take action.  But I had not stopped to consider the lack in my understanding of justice and society.  And how justice for all reflects the heart of God.

There is a lot of humble stillness and lowly heart work involved in rising.  Nothing glorious or stunning.  Just quiet, dark, quarantined heart work.

If the world had not shut down in a global pandemic, would I have done that work?  

I don’t exactly know how to take action, but one thing has become clear: 

If I don’t take action, something in me will die.  Or will never have the chance to truly live.  

So, from this humbler and haunted place I desperately seek to learn in community from those who are taking action. To join. To grow.  To serve.  I thought the vulnerable and the marginalized needed me.  It turns out, we need each other.

Rising above is not mine to achieve.  Starting to live is not mine to map out.  

Mine is to quietly join the labors of love.  

  • To learn from those who weary their hearts and dirty their hands for the plight of others.  
  • To allow the plight of the vulnerable to be felt deeply and personally.  
  • To understand how to do justly, because I cannot truly love mercy without it.  Mercy accompanies justice.
  • Ultimately, to surrender the sense of self I’ve worked so hard to grasp.

Mine is the work of vulnerable humility.

Rising belongs to the Divine Hand that is strong and wise enough to lift me up in due time.

Just curious… what are the daunting malignancies you’ve been called to rise above?

CHRONIC HOPE #6: The Luxury of Looking Forward

~ Georgia Coats ~ 6 Comments

“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.

When I was first diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) in my 20s I stopped looking too far forward.  Planning for the future felt presumptuous, so I learned to live more fully in the present.

IMG_5562

September 2019 marked 19 years since my cancer diagnosis.

I’ve had the privilege of reflecting back on 2 decades of living alongside a cancer diagnosis while continuously being treated for it.

4 different cancer treatments.

12+ bone marrow biopsies.

2 cutting edge miracle meds.

3 miracle babies. 

3 times achieving medicated remissions.

2 relapses.

1 Master’s Degree.  

Tens of thousands of dollars invested.

This journey is chronic. Chronic struggles. Chronic tears. Chronic persistence. Eventually forging a resilient chronic hope that anchors the soul.

I have learned invaluable life lessons of chronic hope: 

We all have struggles.  We all need help.  We all seek a hope that is bigger than us.

We don’t rise above our struggles alone.

fullsizeoutput_1488

I can dare to make long-term goals that are bigger than me, because others dared before me.

In 1959 a researcher identified a very specific chromosomal abnormality present in CML patients.  In the 1990s my first miracle medication was developed—a targeted immunotherapy treatment that was revolutionary.  The standard chemotherapy treatments do not discriminate between healthy cells and cancerous ones, thus, leaving the patient with a myriad of miserable toxicities and a bleak prognosis.  But this miracle medication targeted and treated a very specific problem inside of me, on a genetic level.  It was proven more effective, more efficient, and less toxic than standard chemo.

It changed the world for people like me.

 

Reflecting back is essential for moving forward.

Now, with 3 growing kids, a specialized degree as a language and culture learning coach, and a healthy body in medicated remission, I dare to look forward.

There are so many people along the way who have given of themselves for me to be in this privileged place.

Like the doctor who created my miracle med after building on a researcher’s breakthrough 30 years earlier, what offerings can I bring that just might change the quality of life for a single soul?

These words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. both scare and inspire me:

“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”  MLK, Jr.

As a language learning coach, I love to champion individuals towards greater possibilities in their lives.  But MLK Jr.’s words challenge me further forward.  How can I rise above my personal cancer and be a part of treating malignancies that face all humanity?

While Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s impact on society was profound, maybe he started with small offerings and a few champions in his life.  I can do that!  I can spend precious life energy trying to figure out my present and future impact, courageously taking small steps forward.

“If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.”  MLK, Jr.

IMG_5578

Thank you, dear people in my life, who have championed me along the way to fight my battles with cancer—my devoted Greek-immigrant family, my loving husband in sickness and in health, my life-giving friends, my empathetic professors and generous neighbors.

Thank you, doctors and researchers, for devoting your lives and your minds to profoundly changing my prognosis and my quality of life.

Thank you, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for your wisdom and impact on the world, and for encouraging me to bravely take baby steps far beyond my personal cancer.

Thank you, readers, for allowing me to reflect back and dare into the future on this journey of chronic hope.

IMG_3359

 

This article was published in a series of articles for the Yemeni American News, October, 2019:

Georgia Coats is a Language & Culture Learning Coach, freelance writer, educator, wife, and mother of three who is passionate about healthy mind-body-spirit living.  Chronic Hope is Georgia’s collection of stories, lessons, and life adventures of living alongside chronic leukemia, cancer of the white blood cells, for two decades.  She often shares what’s on her mind at: www.onmymindbygeorgia.wordpress.com