Scribing the Journey

The walls are crumbling. The doors are flung open. And I am there, kneeling with you, and we are trembling.

We are trembling for fear of what’s to come, for fear of who we have been, for fear of who we might be called to become. I feel this trembling in your messages and the conversations we’ve had over the past few days.

There is an unsettling outcry, a cataclysmic anger, a booming sadness in our nation, these days, and I’m afraid, we are watching from the disillusioned safety of our exclusion.

This is the sentiment of what I want to write to you, dear reader. I am writing, first and foremost, always to myself, because I need to put these words down; put them down like a map to a better world when our carefully constructed walls collapse. I have determined to write honestly and bravely. To be vulnerable and willing to make mistakes and have hard conversations because the ripping of flesh is what creates new strength and I want to thank all the people who replied to my recent words and asked hard questions and called me to explore the weight of this topic.

Let’s talk about justice. There are many kinds of justice; social justice, economic justice, environmental justice, retributive justice and redemptive justice, just to name a few. I received many messages from readers saying “justice is God’s department, not ours” and this is the focus of my words today. For me first, and maybe for you.

What is justice? Merriam-Webster says that it is simply “just behavior or treatment: a concern for justice, peace, and genuine respect for people”.

This is putting a stop to gossip. This is kindness to people different from ourselves. This is the outcry for peace between two opposing sides. This is the justice I stand for. This is the justice I raise my hand against the dying day in hopes of a better tomorrow.

For many of my readers (it may be the boomer generation’s interpretation) justice conjures images of beatings, lynchings, and the resounding bang of a gavel against the remnants of someone’s life. This likely is judgement. The dictionary describes judgement as “the ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions – a decision of a court or judge”. Although I know the judicial system is necessary, I belong to the kingdom of peace.

What is redemptive justice? When I first learned of this term, I was sitting in an ethics class discussing the age old case of a boy who stole bread because without stealing, he would starve to death.

Redemptive justice makes me cry tonight, friends, as I write these words to you and to myself. I am that boy. I have stolen from others to feed my self-serving interests. I have tested God’s love time and again only to have Him arrive and love me still. Redemptive justice is a justice that ends in reconciliation and peace for all people involved. Redemptive justice is the act of Jesus dying on the cross to absolve us of our sin so if I’m a Christian who isn’t about justice, then I’m a Christian who isn’t about Christ.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in Between the World and Me, writes to his black son about growing up in a white America, these words: The new people were something else before they were white — Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish — and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes of white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.”

To be a Christian, then, is to acknowledge that our lineage and culture and way of viewing our immediate society was built on deep-rooted subconscious racism. To be a Christian who stands for justice, especially redemptive justice, is to be a Christian who attempts to resolve this inequality by peaceful reconciliation, to stamp out our own personal biases, to work hard to loosen the economic, social, and educational chains binding our black neighbors. To be a Christian who stands for justice is to step out of our carefully constructed walls excluding us from the world and its problems and start asking the hard questions and living the hard truths. To be a Christian is to recognize God as the creator of life, to recognize God who created man in His image, and to love all of His precious children.

“There are two aspects to the importance of treating human life reverently. First, proper respect for human life is essential for the happiness and well-being of a society. Secondly, it is imperative if one is to serve and worship God in truth.”  Bible Doctrine & Practice, pg. 408.

“Maintain justice and do what is right,” God tells us and it’s not enough anymore to knee-jerk respond with our canned answers of I love black people and I believe God created all men equal and it’s just in their DNA not to succeed because I have said these things and I’m ashamed and I’m absolutely certain we are called to be better than this by the God we serve. The issue is so much bigger than what we see outside our crumbling walls and it’s time to disrupt our most intimate ways of thinking and challenge ourselves to see a different light. “For my salvation is close at hand and my righteousness will soon be revealed.” -Isaiah 56:1

The walls around our lives are crumbling, dear reader, and we are kneeling within the church, our beautiful church with its doors flung open to all, and we are trembling now, not out of fear, but out of hope for what we might accomplish in God’s name if we learned to love a little bit better.

Written from a place of acknowledging I will make many mistakes but a true desire to keep having the hard conversations. If you would like to educate yourself on the topic, consider purchasing the aforementioned book Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo.

            These words were originally meant for people of color everywhere. Victims don’t want to relive their trauma, I’ve learned, and I think in the end an apology is empty without appreciable change. They’ve heard the apologies. They’ve seen white people write words… lots of words, falling empty, into the endless bowels of blogosphere with the sole purpose of disillusioned redemption of white people’s guilt. So no, these words aren’t an apology for black people. They’re meant for people like me, who grew up in a middle-class Christian family. They’re meant for people like me, who were taught that skin color didn’t matter. They’re meant for all of us, for wherever we are, on our journey toward humanitarian equity.

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I get it. I haven’t always. Say one thing about the rioting, it’s this: we are finally paying attention and those burning buildings aren’t black people’s fault; they’re mine. I lit that match. I did this. I’ve heard white supremacist are lighting trash cans in the name of black people and it makes bile rise in my throat how the nation jumped to conclusions about who was doing it but really, it was me. I’m not a white supremacist. But I am racist. And I share responsibility for all this mess.

You see, I didn’t think I was racist because face to face, I have always treated people of color no differently than my white friends… at least I thought. But in the past, I’ve told my wife, “I just love the way she’s got that black person laugh.” Why couldn’t I have just said, like I do with my white friends, “I love her infectious laugh.” Why? I thought I was giving respect to the culture of being black by using this word as an adjective. But I see the nuances here. I see the way my words weren’t really kind at all. Because I used their skin color as a way to belittle the beauty of who they are, individually. I used their skin color to invoke a certain image in my audience’s mind. Does a black person laugh make people think jovial and infectious or obnoxious and unruly? When all I really want to say is this: Her laugh makes me wish I had that untamed joy and I honor her carefree spirit.

“I’m not a racist,” I’ve said, “I just judge every man for his personal character.” But when I see skin color first, my preassigned stereotypes have outlined that person’s personal character making it nearly impossible for their personal character to shine through. Black people’s personal character is that they are black. No further adjectives needed. And when I see a black person in a car with flashing lights behind them? I see their skin color first and I shove down the very inequality and injustice that have led them to their current situation. By noticing their skin color, and subsequently identifying what stereotype they belong to, I have ignored the economic, psychological, and social racism that have been the true handcuffs around their wrists. I see now how I’m not a racist statements always, always end with justification for simply being… a racist.

We witnessed a peaceful protest the other day. Southern Gal, my wife, commented how it almost made her cry and I nodded, tears pooling. We watched the hurt and the sadness and the bravery on the tear-stained faces as they chanted I can’t breathe and in that moment, I realized how much I needed to call out my own racism, how I needed to educate myself and start asking hard questions, how I could no longer hide behind the illusion that I wasn’t part of the problem. I wanted to run into the crowd, then, and be one of the masses just plugging up the streets with my sadness and rage for all of us and how we’ve failed to love; how I’ve failed to love.

I went for a run tonight on a bike trail, along a silent creek, its banks bursting with purple and white delicate flowers. The vast majority of joggers I passed, I noticed, were people of color and I thought about how my black friend once told me, “Yeah, I drive to the trails to run because it’s not safe to run in my neighborhood.”

I hear the shots that killed Maud. I see the strangled death of George.
I watch peaceful protesters being gassed so our President can raise the Bible.

 “Peace on the left, justice on the right,” I hear George’s brother saying.

I raise my hands to sky. My left hand, two fingers outstretched to the setting sun. My right hand, a fist held blunt against the dying day.

I am calling for a new beginning. A new tomorrow. I am under no illusion, however. As I write these words tonight, I have no doubt that I see so dimly the things I need to see and I’m seeking within myself a need for a new faith in humanity, a new hope for our future, and a new love for people of color. Someone really wise once wrote that the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:12-13)

What does love look like? It looks like action. For me, it looks like rioting within my mind, flipping tables in my soul, and lighting fires to my old prejudices.

I won’t apologize for being a racist.
I know people of color need more.
They need change.
They need love.
They need us.

There are cancer survivors choking on phlegm in Seattle.
There are deserted streets in Italy. 
Body bags being zipped. 
Flights canceled. 
Stocks crashing. 
Toilet paper disappearing. 
Democrats blaming Trump; Trump blaming the Democrats. 

They say the world won’t end with a bang, but instead, a quiet whimper, and I feel like the whimpering is getting louder, these days, and then, how, do we live despite the whimpering? 

I am an Emergency Room nurse, one who has been taken as a patient to the ER, blue-lipped with asthma, not moving air, coughing so hard the floors reach up, doors turn sideways, the edges of vision turning dark. 

So you count. You count the times you’ve been potentially exposed to COVID-19. You count the amount of respirators available. You count the people being tested. You count because you know with your asthma that each day you’re able to count as symptom free is the best kind of day. 

“What’s your take on this all?” 

I get this text multiple times a day. I point people to the CDC, to the statistics. I point out the mortality rate. I remind people that just because they’re young and healthy doesn’t mean their duty ends for the elderly and sickly. 

“You will be okay,” I tell people. “But your parents might not.” 

I am not an expert. I have heard the way the virus attaches to a cell, rewrites the DNA, clogs the small little arteries in your lungs responsible for oxygenation. I have heard the reports of people suffocating, drowning on their own secretions. 

What’s true anymore? What’s media hype? And my personal favorite: the Russians are messing with the election. Seriously. Bravo. Please book your upcoming cruise. We need to quarantine this level of ignorance out in the middle of the ocean. 

How to carry on, then, in the face of all…. this? 

“What you carry is what defines you,” Mitch Albom writes in his latest book. “It can be a burden of feeding your family, the responsibility of caring for patients, the good that you feel you must do for others, or the sins that you will not release. Whatever it is, we all carry something, every day.” 

For me, and for all my healthcare friends and colleagues, we are responsible to carry an incredibly scared society. We are responsible to show up, arm ourselves with knowledge, and meticulously follow the rules to ensure the best outcomes possible. We are responsible to put on gowns and masks and still let our smile reach the scared, the vulnerable. We are responsible to take a pulse, start IVs, and swab people’s throats. We carry the weight of stepping toward the disaster while others walk away. And we are blessed with this duty. We are. We really are. 

For you, and all your friends, you carry the weight of a tired world. You carry the weight of caring for your families, for not feeding the mania with anxiety, for washing your hands and staying home more and taking food to your parents and grandparents so they don’t have to get out. You carry the weight of making toilet paper jokes to relieve the tension because if ever we need some humor, it’s now. You carry the weight of kindness, for texting that nurse or paramedic or doctor you know and saying simply thank you. You carry the responsibility of quiet waiting and careful decisions. 

And when the carrying gets too hard? When the fear takes hold or growing cynasim makes you angry?

I find the answer while the morning sun warms the world outside and while Ervin grumps at the deer bedded down in the trees. I find it on the pages and it’s almost as if God has stepped close and whispered the words: You can have peace, here with me. In this world, you may experience trouble. But take heart, tired one, I have overcome the world. (John 16:33).

It’s incredibly unpopular to fall back on faith in these times. It’s easier to blame, easier to rely solely on science, easier to buy every Clorox wipe on the shelf, but it’s okay, friends, to recognize that a healthy dose of educated responsibility coupled with a quiet, trusting faith in a God who cares is how we are going to get through. 

So let’s get on with getting through, shall we? 

I’m lying on the beach in Florida, book in hand, hot tamales melting on my fingertips.

There’s a man throwing a net into the ankle deep part of the ocean, another untangling fishing line from a reel, a mother offering children sandwiches and juice boxes.  

This is how I spend my time at the beach. Reading and rereading the same passsage in a book because I allow myself interruptions… peaceful, long interuptions because sometimes a weary soul just needs purposeful pointlessness until it can catch its breath. 

Here at the beach, there is always an unhurried parade of life, a slow hum of human stories with all their unique plots just walking past, some stooping to pick up a shell, others talking in clipped, foreign languages, some simply ambling as if backdrops to everyone else’s existence. 

I move back to my book, ripe with the violence of Mexican cartels and border security and a heroine alone with her child. 

There’s an excited shrill, then, from a little girl, and I watch as she runs to her dad who has just caught a fish. It dangles, wriggling on the end of his line.  

I watch the man shake his pole, then, trying to dislodge the hook without having to touch the fish. He pauses and I watch how the small fish flips and flops against its own bloody existence and how its little body is vibrant orange in the setting sun, like it’s on stage under a spotlight and this is its final performance. 

I see him, then, put that fish against the hot, gritty earth and place his foot over its writhing, tiring body, giving one quick yank to free the hook. He decides, now, he can touch the fish and he picks it up, throws its little, torn frame up the beach, away from the waves. It struggles, lies still, and I imagine its mouth opening and closing, opening and closing while a paddleboarder floats by and while a mother takes pictures for Facebook and while the seagulls screech above waiting for the fish to be left alone. 

And I watch the way his daughter sees it all with her deep, understanding eyes and later, how she pokes the dead fish with a stick, impaling it’s tiny body against the beach and this is how the world works, it seems, with the innocent dying at the hands of the oblivious. 

I am too tired to be angry. I am too weary to speak up. Because sometimes it is so much bigger than that little fish and it feels like you’re the only one who notices all the unkindness, that you’re the only willing to ask the hard questions, that you’re the only one taking on this entire, unjust world and it’s a terrible, lonely existence, one where you want to lock the front door to your house and curl up on the couch with a tub of Ben & Jerry’s and your dog. 

I think about how tired, really, truly exhausted, I am with it all: with all the parts that make up this horrifically unkind world. How right now, the Democrats are slinging mud and the Republicans are slinging it back, how the gunmen are still killing people, how everyone is blaming anyone other than fate for every Coronavirus death, how koalas are just now starting to heal their little bodies from the burns by arsonists, how sometimes it feels like the only logical thing to do is give up on this big, broken world. 

I no longer belong here, I think. I can feel it in my bones, the way I’m too old or too new or too jaded or too sensitive to exist in a world where darkness pushes at the edges of my every waking moment. 

The breeze catches the pages of my book, flips them rapidly, like its shuffling the words to maybe rewrite a different story. I close my eyes, feel the sea spray against my face, feel a quiet tumble over me like a sleeping seashell lifted from the deep. 

“The power of choice happened long ago,” Southern Gal says, “and if God didn’t allow bad things to happen then there’d be no need for redemption.”

I can see it, then: we desperately need to live in a world of redemption because it’s the only way we’ll survive this mess we were born into. It’s the only way we can account for the countless poisonous apples we’ve eaten right here, out of our own garden of Eden. Because seeing a broken world filled with broken, imperfect people and believing in its redemption is taking one giant step toward trusting in a God determined to save the world.

There are dolphins playing in the bay, now. They make me smile, the way they flirt with the pelican floating on the surface where they dip in and out. Then I think, also, about the dolphins stuck in cages across this globe and how the marine biologists are concerned because once the mothers give birth, how the mothers sometimes try blocking their babies from getting to the surface for that one big breath of life. Like they know, somehow, that they don’t want to bring their little ones into this world of injustice, into this world of captive imperfectness.

I dreamt, once, that I flew to Montego Bay, and in the dead of night, donned my scuba gear and walked along the patterned ocean floor until I found the rusty gate to release all the dolphins into the wild. I remember waking from that dream, just as the dolphins were streaming past me into the deep waters and I laid there and wanted to cry for every single one still held in cages but I thought, instead, that I might need coffee if I was going to do an ounce of good in this world so I got up and made myself some in my favorite cup that reads “Don’t Let the Muggles Get You Down”.

God looks a lot like you and I, I think. He looks like a coffee-infused intentionalist who thinks about the animals, about the planet, about others. God looks a lot like thoughtful kindness, like a dad teaching his child to do the least amount of harm, like a Democrat or Republican giving up a label for the sake of what’s ethically and morally right. He looks like a smile, a willingness to be brave in the face of injustice, like a person willing to quit accepting easy answers to life’s toughest questions.

He looks like you, yes you, stepping bravely out your front door.

He’s sitting on the couch, silent, snuggled between two of his friends. His knees are drawn up as if pulling himself deep into the cushions and he’s just watching the other children as they welcome us to their home in broken English.

“Ello,” they say, then giggle.

Laughter rings throughout the small orphanage, then, because I am so very, very bad at Spanish and my thick tongue gets in the way every time but I’ve learned this time and again: words can fail us when we need them the most but kindness never fails.

“Buenos dias, me llamo Marty.”

The little boy with his knees drawn up isn’t laughing with the others. “Can you tell him I like how he combed his hair?” I reach, then, toward his perfectly spiked, shiny hair and tousle it. He whimpers and withdraws, brow furrowed, knees drawn deeper still into his chest, fading away.

“This is the way the world ends,” I think, “not with a bang but a whimper.” (T.S. Elliot)

“Perdon. I’m sorry,” I tell him.

“Some of these children were… how do you say it in English… abused by their fathers,” the translator explains.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him again and I think about the many times he must have heard “sorry”, how his father must have felt guilty and promised him his love only to ruin it all, again and again, this boy’s little world shattered on the cold floor.  

How do you piece together a child’s broken heart?

“Some of these children, the familia do drugs. Alcohol too sometimes.”  

We’re walking through the orphanage and children spill from the rooms, watching, smiling, waving. It looks like each one of them must have spent an hour in front of the mirror because they are dressed in crisp, clean shirts, scrubbed, neon Crocs, and colorful shorts.

“They have been waiting all year for you to come,” one of the mothers tells us.

I notice the curious eyes of the broken boy, peaking from behind a dirty wall. I wave slowly, smile, turn away.

How do you piece together a child’s shattered life?

I think, then, about a Man who walked this broken earth, one of the best humanitarians this world has ever known and I think about how He would sit, overloaded with children squirming on every knee and still, Him opening his arms for more. I wonder if His eyes pooled with tears when he marveled at the beauty of a child’s, tender heart and I wonder if He wept when he thought about the pain they might have endured. I wonder about all this and then I hear the words He whispered next: Let the little children come unto me.

This is how you heal a broken heart. This opening up your arms, time and again, letting the broken world come to you on their broken terms and realizing that you’re all in this together: just one broken mess and it’s when the shattered pieces of all your brokenness come together that the world is made strong.

This is how you fix a shattered life. The world is made stronger when kindness prevails, when hearts heal, when connection with others is placed above all else.  

The world is made stronger when you buy a cup of coffee for the person behind you at Starbucks. When you remind a stranger at the gas station that motherhood gets easier and she’s doing a great job. When you ask a coworker how they’re doing, no, how they’re really doing.

When you simply open your arms to an abused child and let them come to you.

Listen slowly, friends… can you hear it? Can you hear that tiny laughter of the child whose forgotten how? Can you hear the carefree chatter of children clambering in play? Can you hear the shrieks of laughter as children cannonball into a pool?

It’s the sound of our hearts healing, bit by broken bit.  

That’s the sound of a big world healing.

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It’s time to leave the orphanage. The boy with the spiked hair sits atop my shoulders. My Patagonia hat sits askew, flopping on his head. He keeps pushing my wayfarer sunglasses up on his petite nose.

“Hasta la vista, mi amigo. Hasta la vista.”

I try to lower him down to the ground and he clamps his slender, bug bitten and scraped legs across my chest, across my neck.

It is hard to swallow. Not from the death grip this precious child has on my neck. No, from the death grip he has on my heart.

Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” (Matthew 19:14)

(Photos used with permission)