What has our heart been trained to believe?
From a young age, love just seemed like a natural feeling. I felt love for people until, whether implicitly or explicitly, people let me know that love might not need to be as open as I naturally believed it to be.Children love naturally. In fact, they love and trust so naturally that they need to be taught to be cautious about a stranger trying to give them free candy. We don’t teach people how to love because love comes naturally. However, we demonstrate how to love deeply, and we most certainly exemplify how to withhold love. And learning to withhold love is dangerous. I’ve heard people use hateful words, (racially insensitive words, words that objectify women) and excuse them away because “they were raised in a different time.” Our hearts get trained to hate and to exclude and to accept injustice. On October 1, 1995, Nelson Mandela referenced this idea in a speech on the nature of love and hate: “ No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, ...