![\"StandingGroundimage\"](\"https:\/\/oshetablogs.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/02\/standinggroundimage.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nI\u2019m excited to \u201cjoin hands\u201d in prayer with two of my favorite poets: Chelle Wilson and Rachel Lee Haas.\u00a0 Both women have captured their pain over division in the Body in stunning words and masterful imagery.\u00a0 They have inspired me to imagine a future where we are fully known and unconditionally accepted. Where we speak hard truths with kind words.\u00a0 Where we celebrate our differences and in so doing, we create this bright tapestry of color held tightly together by stitches fortified by the unbreakable love of Christ.\u00a0 Today, join Rachel, Chelle, and me pray for God to meet us in our confusion and give us a vision of comfort. Today, I\u2019m praying Matthew 11:28-30 for the mothers who stood beside the casket of their brown babies, confused angry, terrified, and forever changed: their babies were cut down, \u201cwhile still green\u201d, far, far, too soon.\u00a0 People of our Great Comforter, today let\u2019s rise up and pray for comfort for those who mourn<\/strong>:<\/p>\n \u201cCome to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.\u00a0\u00a0Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.\u00a0\u00a0For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Chelle is a new friend but I love her so much. She\u2019s funny, smart, and profoundly insightful.<\/p>\n Chelle Wilson may not match your expectations. A Baptist preacher\u2019s kid, she married an Anglican. Formerly an executive in the entertainment industry, she became a reluctant Stay- At-Home-Mom. She talks to God through liturgical dance and writing, all while fiercely guarding her privacy. She\u2019s the girl clutching inherited pearls while tossing her dreadlocks. She is hymns, anthems, jazz vespers, and hip-hop Gospel. She blogs<\/a>, tweets, and muses on Facebook. Chelle is the Director of Community Engagement and a writer for Circles of Faith and a columnist for Christ Centered Home Magazine. When you meet her, she talks all things Sando {her beloved Boxer} and will tell you that God\u2019s got Jokes, which is one of the many ways she knows He Loves her.<\/em><\/p>\n It\u2019s Not That Time\u2026Elegy for Murdered Sons (part blues, part dirge) A Prayer by Chelle Wilson<\/strong><\/p>\n Dear Lord,<\/p>\n They don\u2019t lynch black boys anymore, at least not like they used to. Now they let them believe that they are proud, and beautiful, and free. I\u2019m just a mama. Sybrina Fulton, Lucia McBath, and I all held brown boys beneath our hearts, carrying them as parts of us until the day they\u2019d burst forth into the world. It was a time to weep and a time to laugh. A time of great promise in our lives and in our America where we never imagined that being mothers to young black men meant that we\u2019d given life to a gravely endangered species. Lord, what time is this?<\/p>\n As you did with Your Only Begotten Son, we mothers gave our sons both roots and wings, holding our breath as they learned to fly. My sisters with names known and unknown never expected their young kings to take wing for the heavens so soon. There is a time to plant, and a time to pluck what is planted. Young Black Men are yet so green. Why is it so often their time?<\/p>\n How, Father, can we send our baby boys to eternal rest; saying goodbye rather than saying goodnight? No one warns you of the voids those partings will leave in your heart. Mothers should not bury their sons so early or so often, but this I know; \u201cto everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven\u2026a time to be born and a time to die,\u201d and yet we ask, yet we cry, is this THAT time?<\/p>\n 2008, the year our son stood between his father, sister, and I in Washington, DC to hear the first President who looked like him take the Oath of Inauguration, the Children\u2019s Defense Fund reported a firearm death rate for black boys ages 15 to 19 more than four times higher than for comparable Whites. Lord God, what time is this?<\/p>\n It is said that love, endless and relentless, redeems all wrong. Just how much time does that take? How long, oh Lord, how long?<\/p>\n Jill Scott, in My Petition, laments in my ear about an America gone horribly wrong, saying\u2026<\/p>\n You say you mean good for me<\/p>\n But you don\u2019t do it<\/p>\n You say you have a plan but you just don\u2019t go thru with it<\/p>\n You say you know the way to go<\/p>\n And I should follow<\/p>\n But all of your empty promises<\/p>\n Leave me hollow<\/p>\n And oh<\/p>\n How do I trust you<\/p>\n How do I love you<\/p>\n When you<\/p>\n Lie to me repeatedly<\/p>\n And oh<\/p>\n How do I have faith, in you<\/p>\n When you just don\u2019t come thru<\/p>\n Like you say you could<\/p>\n Oh, say can you see\u2026<\/p>\n Lord, we cry out to you knowing You\u2019re all we\u2019ve got. We seek Your Face because the pain we share is a pain not to be borne alone.<\/strong> It is too sharp, it is too searing. It makes us afraid to give life and afraid to nurture hope.<\/p>\n And yet in You we place our trust. In tribute to the memory of too many slain young princes is our pledge to lift our voices to the cause of Justice; raise our prayers to You and stand with those that mourn. This, Lord, we know, though there is a time to mourn, a time to dance will come.<\/p>\n Father, grant us mercy. Hear a mother\u2019s prayer.<\/p>\n Amen<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Next up is one of my Story Sisters, Rachel Lee Hass.<\/p>\n oh Mighty King,<\/p>\n step down and see.<\/p>\n oh Creator of all,<\/p>\n reach down and hold.<\/p>\n oh Daddy,<\/p>\n help us.<\/p>\n we are living in a land of divide, of lines drawn in the sand to keep the colours from blending together when they bleed, except when a boy of darker colour is bleeding on the pavement from a bullet fired from pale-coloured hands. and that\u2019s when it merges into shades of grey fog, and there\u2019s so much staggering, and so much confusion. and there\u2019s so much weeping, Jesus. there\u2019s so much weeping.<\/p>\n because there\u2019s hands up, clenched fists pounding against walls that should have been knocked down\u00a0 years ago, that should have never been raised at all. we\u2019re shuffling back into iron chains that You bled Yourself dry to corrode into flakes of rust.<\/p>\n move in me, Spirit of the Living God. breathe understanding in this world of upside-down and backward spinning. reach down within and tear off the scales from eyes that cannot see the privilege, that sit comfortably surrounded by comfort, quick to comment to Your state of colour-blindness when they cannot even bring their eyes up to meet Yours.<\/p>\n but, Papa God, I don\u2019t think You\u2019re colour-blind. You didn\u2019t reach Your fingers into the paint and fling dark skin at some and light skin at others and cross Your fingers, as though unsure of the outcome. You caress cheeks and fingers and tummies and feet with brown and peach, shades of glory instead of segregation at the forefront of Your mind.<\/p>\n if You were colour-blind, You would not see the red blood on the pavement. You would not see the\u00a0 whites of eyes turned pink and weary with hours of weeping as mothers shovel dark brown earth over the babies their bodies bore that they will never cradle close again. You would not see the way the sky shines blue over courthouses while masses shuffle in and out and gavels bang and people scream.<\/p>\n oh Prince of Peace, breathe grace over this tumult. oh Comforter, hold the mothers of the victims of this war tender-close. there are bottles in Your Father\u2019s house for tears, and there is no segregation between black and white there. there is only the line drawn between Light and darkness, between fragrant Love and rancid hate.<\/p>\n oh Mighty King,<\/p>\n step down and see.<\/p>\n oh Creator of all,<\/p>\n \u00a0reach down and hold.<\/p>\n oh Daddy,<\/p>\n \u00a0help us.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/a>Chelle Wilson writes. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/a>Rachel Haas is a novel-writing, coffee-consuming, paint-flinging, wild-at-heart Jesus craver. She is married to Jonathon, as she has been for the past four years, and is mother to Marian. \u00a0She dwells in between Midwestern cornfields where she pours her heart out in lowercase abandon. She blogs at Dramatic Elegance.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n