Good morning…
After a very significant phone conversation, she wrote me a thought-provoking text.
“I just saw a photograph on Instagram this evening, the pain and the trauma expressed needs no fact checking,” she wrote. “The image was a black woman holding a handwritten sign that read, ‘We live in a world where trained cops can panic & act on impulse, but untrained civilians must remain calm with a gun in their face.'”
“Very intense and quite difficult to know how God is going to work out all of these tensions,” I replied. “I have been thinking about your comment that we as white privileged people have the luxury of turning off the news when truth gets too uncomfortable, tuning out the issues when we get tired of thinking about them. But the relentlessly oppressed wear wearied skin everywhere and these issues never go away. How excruciatingly exhausting. George Floyd, Daunte Wright, this 13 year old Chicago boy killed by a police person, it feels like the pain just seems to be intensifying. But in truth, it is my awareness of these painful dynamics that is intensifying. I am slowly beginning to wake up. To be honest, I feel really ambivalent about opening my eyes to the immense pain on all sides. Who was it that said, “Ignorance is bliss?” It is so much easier to look the other way, to turn off my heart and distract myself with lesser things, to avoid the pain of everyone involved. The Spirit draws me deeper. Unless I inch my eyes open and keep them open, God cannot use me as part of His healing solution.”
When you’re feeling lazy, come and learn a lesson from this tale of the tiny ant. Yes, all you lazybones, come learn from the example of the ant and enter into wisdom. The ants have no chief, no boss, no manager—no one has to tell them what to do. You’ll see them working and toiling all summer long, stockpiling their food in preparation for winter.
So wake up, sleepyhead. How long will you lie there? When will you wake up and get out of bed? If you keep nodding off and thinking, “I’ll do it later,” or say to yourself, “I’ll just sit back awhile and take it easy,” just watch how the future unfolds! By making excuses you’ll learn what it means to go without. Poverty will pounce on you like a bandit and move in as your roommate for life (Proverbs 6:6-11, TPT).
I wonder if somehow my ambivalent avoidance is slowly teaching me what it means to go without peace, to go without equal opportunity, to go without answers to life’s difficult questions. Maybe it is time for the poverty-stricken to move into my compassionate awareness as a roommate to learn with for life. “Now is always better than later,” concludes the footnote for verse eleven. “Today is the day to choose what’s right and serve the Lord.”
God, please inch my eyes open and help me to keep them open, so that You might somehow use me in Your plan to redeem all of creation. As internally driven as the tiniest ants, LORD, how might we inch forward, together, with You in the lead?
…Sue…
