Sometimes

Sometimes I wish I didn't know.

Because when you know, sometimes it consumes you.

And then sometimes you get scared for what it all means - for your neighborhood, for your community, for your world.

For their world.

 

 

Sometimes I wish it wasn't about black or white. Or about who loves who. Or about whose God is right. But often it seems to be. And so sometimes, it consumes me.

 

Because I just don't understand.

 

Several years ago, I went to a Bebo Norman concert with some friends. I love me some Bebo. And I loved him some more when he purported that what we should always ask ourselves is not where is God, but where are God's people?

 

I just don't understand. I do not understand how the same people who fight for life don't do the same when it involves a 17-year-old black boy who was just trying to walk home.

 

A 17-year-old black boy who didn't start the fight. Who didn't have the gun. Who was being followed by a stranger. And who clearly didn't have the right to defend himself. Not in life and not in death.

 

And this consumes me. Where are God's people? The same ones who fight for the sanctity of life? Does this sanctity end at birth? Does it end at a certain age? At a certain color? In a certain neighborhood?

 

Sometimes I cannot accept that this is our truth.

 

So sometimes I remind myself of my A.P. Junior English class this past year. Of the bright and beautiful lives that began my each and every day. In the very back of the classroom, sitting side by side, were a Muslim student in her hijab and a transgendered student in his camo pants and ball cap.

And they were friends. Good friends who shared inside jokes and copied each other's homework and treated each other with grace and dignity and respect.

 

God's people.

 

Sometimes it is so damn easy to worry about the world I am sending my sweet babies into.

 

Yes, it can be consuming.

 

But despite our different world views and our different perspectives of what the sanctity of life should look like, we have a choice everyday to either take our respective sides and hunker down, or to sit side by side with grace and dignity and respect.

 

Will we choose to try and be God? Or to be God's people?

 

Sometimes the answer seems so clear.