This Is The Crisis We’re In

This is the crisis we’re in: God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for darkness. – John 3:19

I fear my heart has died a million tiny deaths this past week; cellular deaths that make the muscle just a little less human, a little more hard, a plastic representation of what God originally intended. With every act of violence perpetrated, one of us against the other, the crimson blood streaming live on social media, the deadened eyes, the panicked voices, the open, empty hands, the line of hugs, the sobs, the loss, the broken families — all of it screen-sized, reduced to my modern-day-slave-made phone screen. So far away from me and yet intricately and inherently of me. Of you. Of all of us.

This is the crisis we’re in. 

I give voice to the issues. This is my calling, my necessary thing, and it’s true, I am unapologetic about speaking these truths as I see them. I have been called — both in public and private — intimidating, unapproachable, unwise, and more. I take these words, pack them into my plasticized heart and bring them here, into my quiet time with Jesus. We unpack them together, here where I am broken, with my utterly empty and ill-equipped hands, we unpack together.

I don’t wish to be unwise, or to intimidate, or to incite or to condemn. I simply want to throw open the windows and let the God-light in where darkness seems to reign.

I have a confession to make: for a moment this week, I forgot about the Victory.

I gave the devil more than his due.

I thought, The bastard is winning. I pictured him laughing as we, like his puppets, turned away from the God-light and toward our fears and our racism, our anger and our guns. I didn’t feel the hand of God anywhere, and I despaired in that moment, because it seemed He had stopped caring for us, because we had stopped caring for Him.

This is the crisis we’re in: God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for darkness. They went for the darkness because they were really not interested in pleasing God. – John 3:19

We answer violence with violence and placards with hashtags and we steal each other’s pain as if we didn’t have enough of our own. You shoot mine? Fine. I’ll shoot yours. As if there could be a winner in this game of pseudo-thrones.

And the people cry, Where are the Christians? And I wonder the same thing. Because I can give the gift of my words — although some will not think that a gift — but aside from that? Empty hands. Ill-equipped. Hardened heart. Where can I go to be You to the people, me with my empty hands, my plastic heart, my ill-equipped spirit contained in this privileged shell?

And people say, Where is God? And I know how they feel. This invisible hovering, his mystical wind over chaos below — in times like these it’s hard to feel Him, to know He’s there when there is so much gun smoke in the air. If we are not careful we begin to rage at the hovering mystical, for being so damned mystifying. Why can’t you harden up like my plastic heart, come down here to earth and fix this already? Why have you left it to us, when we make such big messes out of everything?

They went for the darkness because they were not really interested in pleasing God. Everyone who makes a practice of doing evil, addicted to denial and illusion, hates God-light and won’t come near it, fearing a painful exposure. – John 3:19

A few years ago, when I was on staff at my church, a man who grew up in Africa came for a coaching session. He sat, soft-spoken; smooth, dark-brown skin that crinkled when he smiled, and he gave me his stories to keep. I’d thought that there could be no one from whom I could be more different. Me, the white American soccer-mom-slash-Gex-Xer-slash-Totally-Inept-Christian and him, the young black man who grew up in a village in Africa, where his parents died of AIDS and he and his younger siblings were shunned for it.

He told me his stories and I realized how very much the same we all are, but for our confusion at the pain our parents inflict; the hopes and dreams we carry into this life like lunchboxes that hold the sustenance of destiny; the fears and wounds we lick like pearls, as if they were a currency we could use to get us out of this pitiful life.

And yet here, right here, if I let it, a greater divide can come up between my neighbor and me, not for the oceans between us but for the illusionary hues of our skin. We feel some ridiculous pressure to choose a blue uniform or the brown skin, as if one were more human than the other, the other more loved by God and the one, less precious somehow. And we have bought into the illusion that all our souls are less important than the skins that contain them. And every spirit-heart breaks. We deny our own humanity with this addiction to only what we can see.

Placards and hashtags. Memes and violent videos.

We are constantly exposed to the truth and yet we choose to not see for the fear of the painful exposure — our own participation in this fuck-all messed up world. Our silence, our ache, our stoicism. Our anger.

But anyone working and living in truth and reality welcomes God-light so the work can be seen for the God-work it is. 

Early this morning I did the work of family. The girl need to be at her leadership program by 8 am, so we got in the car, the morning dawning grey and wet. I kissed the boy’s cheek, rubbed my hand along his shirtless, pale back as played his video games. I watched my girl as she got out of the car, walked down the sidewalk to our martial arts studio. So recently she and I were both so young that neither of us would have let her walk down the sidewalk alone. She would be checking for my presence, I would be hovering like God over the waters.

I left her there to become the leader she is destined to be and thought about what she would want later — bread. As I got in the car, I put my phone on shuffle and prayed, Dear God, I need a worship song but I don’t have the energy to pick one. Please play the one my soul needs. 

The one that came on was Third Day’s version of Morning Has Broken. It would not have been my pick, and I wondered what lesson God had for me in the song. It wasn’t until the last stanza that I understood:

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
Born of the one light, Eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God’s re-creation of the new day

In that moment, I remembered the victory. I remembered that even today, in all these troubles, this crisis we’re in, morning breaks anew. God can re-create out of ashes love, respect, dignity, peace.

For all.

_____________________________________________________________________________

All scripture is from The Message.