writing the journey
What is the answer we tell a father like Danté who just wants to send his kids to school and expect to see them return? What do we tell the mother in Tehran who sent her daughter to school, a smart, clever girl who is her hope for the future, and both of them not a clue that at the end of the day there would be no reunion?
I do know this: what we are telling them now, as always, will always never be the truth.
Loving your neighbor does mean holding them accountable to our common principles and common humanity, and it does mean that there is a time when the consequences of violence and terror and destruction will be paid by those who commit the acts.
Warning your neighbor away from the actions is a way to show love by warning them away from the consequences.
How do I make my faith work anymore (and maybe it never did) when such a very Christian nation seems incapable of seeing the violence we are initiating, celebrating, and dismissing, often while claiming the name of Jesus?
You want to terrify politicians? Take away their signs of power which are “respect” and obedience and decorum and complacency. Trip them up, make a point to oppose them at every turn, continuously point out their failures, and continuously refuse to accord them the power to silence you.
That Good Samaritan did a good thing to someone in distress, and if the story stops there, then we have learned a good lesson, right?
But what the story doesn’t tell us in the background, and doesn’t tell us “the rest of the story.”
Perhaps white people’s thoughts and prayers and good intentions aren’t enough when their Black friends are asking for love and dignity.
Wyte people can’t be accused of bias or wrong unless there is exceedingly overwhelming “proof,” and even then we will go down fighting and insisting that we were not wrong
We have to face the fact that Christians often pick up odious behavior traits and exhibit them while singing songs of love and praise to Jesus of Nazareth.
A lot of what passes for discipleship and church membership in America is lacking in this demand to lay down our lives before Jesus and to cast aside the devil and all his works.
