What's Your Vision of Repair?

The difference between breakers and builders

In the fall of 2021, we began to consider leaving Canada. We had moved to Toronto in 2011 on a three-year work permit, but that permit was renewed again and again until 2017 when we finally secured permanent residency and decided to buy a house. We planned to stay in the city we’d grown to love. But we didn’t stay of course, because the responsibility to care for my mother, not yet been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, called us back to the United States. We left Canada in the summer of 2022 and moved to Cincinnati.

Care for an aging parent didn’t exactly call us “home”—because home is no longer something I can name or lay claim to. I am a product of mobilization, of coming and going, of leaving and staying and leaving again. I am not at home in this world, though, as I’ve learned, this turns out to be a deeply Christian position. (After writing Keeping Place, I finally made peace with my ache for home and its absence.) Still, in the fall of 2021, as we grew more and more sure about returning to the States, we decided to begin the process of securing Canadian citizenship. To some, this might have seemed like odd timing, but we understood that if we left Canada, effectively giving up our residency, we’d have no right of return. This wasn’t something we were prepared to lose—because who was to say what God had for our future and the future of our children, three of whom were then attending Canadian universities?

If you didn’t know it before, you can see now that I am a person of divided national loyalties—a carrier of two passports. I sing two anthems and celebrate two independence days. Even if I can’t now recall the name of the first Canadian Prime Minister nor persuasively explain the parliamentary system of Canadian government, I can’t help but be deeply concerned in this political moment when the longstanding neighborliness between the United States and Canada is over. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carnet has said as much recently, admitting publicly what many Canadians have been thinking. (I’d encourage you to listen to reporting done by The Daily to get a sense of Canadian outrage over recent actions by the current American president.)

Things are breaking, and it is breaking my heart.

On a recent phone call with Canadian friends, we were asked to represent American opinion in this conflict, where President Trump has not only levied crippling tariffs on Canada but has also called into question the legitimacy of the two nations’ border treaty. President Trump has made more than unveiled threats about making Canada the 51^st state, which few in Canada brush off as exaggeration. I had to confess to our Canadian friends that many Americans, if they even understand the gravity of this rupture, fail to care. I had to confess that the current administration’s orientation towards our longest-standing allyship represents the worst of the global American personality. By virtue of being the global superpower, we imagine that belligerence is our national right.

We can do as we please—for now. But I want to say this seems to be a short-sighted and extremely vicious (by which I mean to suggest vice) foreign policy. It’s a policy of breaking things, not building things—which is really the whole point of this letter. I want to interrogate the purported “heroism” of breaking things. What requires greater wisdom, fortitude, and virtue? Breaking things or building things?

Breaking, as a course of action, requires little more than bluster and bravado. It is motivated by anger, by outrage, by vengeance. (By the way, all of these are repudiated by Christian faith and commitments, or at least strongly cautioned against.) It seems to me that breaking is the soup du jour, whether we’re talking about American foreign policy or evangelicalism or purity culture or political protests on Ivy League campuses. Tear it all down, burn the bad to the ground! Quite frankly, I’m growing so impatient with the valorization of breaking, a campaign that turns out to be far more juvenile than mature. If you want to break something, you can do it in a moment. But if you want to build? For this you will need long-sighted patience. You will need the capacity to cooperate, to give yourself to projects that endure beyond your moment, even your lifetime. You will need vision, and you will need hope.

Last week, I stood in front of an art installation at Cincinnati’s CityLink office, which captured some of the visionary words of Martin Luther King, Jr. CityLink is a home in our city for residents looking to better their lives. It provides integrated social services as a way of showing God’s love for all image-bearers. CityLink is a building project, and it feeds on the vision of those like MLK, who understood that sometimes your dream, and the work required, will not be realized for you but for the next generation. You’re building for your children—because that’s how long building takes. Still, you hold to the merits of building— because love has the power to will a good you might never yourself see.

To be sure, sometimes breaking is a part of building. You often have to dismantle before you can put back together. Still, we can’t valorize breaking as a courageous act in and of itself. We can’t lionize breakers simply for their powers of violence. This is one reason I’m deeply disturbed in our political moment: because whether we’re talking about our global alliances or our governmental bureaucracy, certain segments of the population seem only to cheer that things are getting broken. My question is: what’s getting built? What’s being improved for the lives of our citizens? For our closest neighbors and global allies? Show me a vision for building something true and good and beautiful.

Before you take certain buildings down, remember the walls that have served to shelter you.

The Christian gospel tells us about the relationship between building and breaking. It tells us that God endured the breaking of God’s own body in order that repair might be made between God and humanity. Even this story of redemption was millennia in the making, beginning with the patriarchs whose own bad acting always seemed to threaten the plot. God is a patient builder, as I wrote about last week, and God is never threatened by the time love takes.

If you want to break something, you need a sledgehammer and a split second. But if you want to build, you need to believe the world is more than a dumpster fire. You need a story with a narrative arc that climbs toward repair. You need a vision propelled not by hate but love. You need patience for a broken Christ and a Holy Saturday and an empty tomb, then fire falling on that shuttered room of fearful disciples, commissioned to bear witness to resurrection.

If you want to build something, you need encounter with the God who builds and promises to piece together your broken life and love you into wholeness. Then, when God’s mercy purges your hate, you can no longer prize violent acts of breaking, only shudder when they are necessary to clear the ground for another planting and a future spring.

Always, this will be your yearning: for planted seeds and abundant life.