Reading Time: 3 minutes

For the last few weeks, I have felt an overwhelming sadness. A grief that has been hard to fully process, let alone explain to others. I understand that in a culture that is more aware of depression, anxiety, and mental health than previous generations, you could read those words and assume that I’m experiencing one or all of those. But I’m not. My soul, however, is beyond weary, and it has everything to do with the church.

Not my church or your church. THE church. The collective body of Christ known as the Bride of Christ. The people from every tribe and tongue; the mosaic of faces that reflect the face of One.

That church, and even more specifically, the American flavor of that church. And before I share what I finally realized that I was feeling, let me set the record straight: I love the church. I love the odd mix of people who come together with all of their differences and get blended into a beautiful expression of unity in diversity. I believe in the local church and see how the church does so many things well. She gives generously, she loves compassionately, she serves tirelessly.

But…

There are times when she seems to turn on herself, and in recent weeks, social media seems to be the bloody waters where we see it. As I said to someone recently, it hurts to watch the church eat herself.

I don’t say this because I hope others will jump on the “I HATE CHRISTIANS” bandwagon and comment about how done they are with church. I say this because sometimes we just need another person to shake us, wake us, and remind us of who we are.

So church, this is who you are:

You are worth the blood of Jesus. (Acts 20:28)

You are built on the rock and cannot be overcome, even by hell itself. (Matthew 16:18)

You are the dwelling place of God. (Ephesians 2:22)

You are chosen by God. (1 Peter 2:9)

You are the beloved of God. (Romans 1:7)

There’s an interesting passage in Ezekiel 33:10 that records the first words from God’s people when they realized how far below their identity they were living. They simply cried out, “How then shall we live?” I believe that the same question is rising from the remnant in the church today. We’re seeing people act more like the bully of Christ than the bride of Christ and we are beginning to cry out for God to do something.

[Tweet “We are seeing people act more like the bully of Christ than the bride of Christ. It’s time for God to do something. Guess what? He is.”]

Guess what? He is, and it was during a recent conversation with someone who had just been to a message therapist that I realized just exactly what God’s doing.

The therapist had used a lot of pressure to loosen the knots in the muscles which resulted in toxins being released in the body and that had left my friend feeling sore.

Wait, pressure on the body releases toxins into the body and causes soreness in the body? Is anyone else making the connection here? COVID, BLM, Social Media wars, elephants, donkeys. Lots of pressure points that God is using to work the knots out of His body.

[Tweet “God is using external pressure points to work out the knots in His body.”]

But it was what they said next that really grabbed my attention: they had been instructed to drink lots of water so that the water could flush the toxins out of the body.

Water is a symbol of the Holy Spirit. John 7:38-39:

“Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified. (emphasis mine)

If ever we’ve needed a move of the Holy Spirit, it’s now. We need rivers of living water to flush the impurities from the body that the pressures we’re facing are releasing. If we stop drinking deeply of the water of the Spirit, we’ll only continue to feel the raging soreness that ultimately results in bullying one another.

We won’t bully because we’re mean, but rather because we’re in pain. The remedy for that isn’t the perfect rebuttal on social media, but rather the perfect comforter from heaven.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

How polarizing is the issue of racism in our country right now? Enough to divide the responses to this blog title into two groups: the fist pumpers and the eye rollers. My desire in this post is to address the second group.

How exhausting is the issue of racism in our country right now? Enough to further divide us into two groups: the group who is tired of dealing with it for hundreds of years and the group who is tired of hearing about it for a couple of months. It’s the second group – the “get over it, move on, realize that slavery was a long time ago” group – that I hope will give me just a few minutes of their time.

I get it. It wasn’t that long ago that I felt like that, not because I was apathetic or mad or frustrated, but because I was unaffected, unsympathetic, and unmoved. And then I watched “The Help.” Now, watching that movie didn’t make me an expert on the history of racism in our country, but by the end of the movie, something had happened.

I. Was. Moved.

I felt the weight of what had been done by people who looked like me to a whole group of people who didn’t, and I wept. Uncontrollably. I sat in a big chair watching the credits, sniffing and trying to breathe as my family looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

I hadn’t, but as the words faded from the tv, I realized that I’d lost my heart. I’d become so full of my life, my world, my – dare I say it? – privilege, that I’d become numb to what so may had felt for so long.

(Hang with me, group 2, I’m headed somewhere.)

That experience at the end of the movie lit a fire in me to want to learn, and listen, and love like I’d never learned, listened, and loved before. It’s funny when I think of the books I’ve read since then – Woke Church, Black and Free, I’m Still Here, How Black is the Gospel?, Talking to Strangers, Daring Greatly, One Blood, Do All Lives Matter?, Under Our Skin, and the one I’m currently reading, The Color of Compromise.

I felt pretty good about that list until I saw the list that John Perkins recommends as a STARTING POINT and realized that I haven’t even begun. 🤪

Just thinking about his list made me tired. Throw in the pressure of potentially saying the wrong thing and being accused of white fragility or white flight or white fright or not understanding my white privilege, and the fear of speaking out is almost overwhelming.

(Quick reminder to Group 2 before we get to my actual point: we’ve just begun to feel the pressure – Group 1 has hundreds of years of weariness)

Now… onto the point of this post… and hang in until the end…

Just for the sake of argument, let’s say that racism is made up. That it’s a divisive tool used to stoke the fires of division in order to achieve a desired political outcome. Let’s pretend that lynchings never happened, that hooded men were imaginary, and that the blazing crosses weren’t real. Let’s just say that this is all a dream and that minorities have had every opportunity that the majority has had since the founding fathers signed our country into existence.

Why would we not still comfort those who are hurting?

Is this who we are? Is this the church? A group of people who would dismiss very real and painful emotions because we think they’re not grounded in reality? If that’s the case, I have one simple question for Group 2:

How did you respond to your children when they woke you up after a bad dream?

My guess is that you didn’t dismiss their fears and tears with a logical conversation about how monsters didn’t exist. Sure, you knew they weren’t real, but you comforted the very real emotions that the child you loved was feeling. I bet you even turned on the light, looked under the bed, and stayed in the bed with your child until he or she fell asleep. In other words, you went to great lengths to help your child overcome the pain he or she was feeling, and you did all that when you were also tired!

[Tweet “The pain in the black community is real, but the dismissal of the black community’s pain is brutal.”]

To be clear, I don’t think the issues that our brothers and sisters have faced for centuries are a dream; I think they’re a nightmare. On that, we don’t have to agree. I think that we can and should have real conversations about it and I think that we may still have different opinions about what’s real and how we should deal with it.

When it comes to racism and racial injustice, we have the freedom to disagree about solutions, but we don’t have the freedom to dismiss the problem.

[Tweet “When it comes to racism and racial injustice, we may disagree about solutions, but we can’t dismiss the problem.”]

The pain in the black community is real, but the dismissal of the black community’s pain is brutal, and our generation is the only one who can currently take steps toward comfort, love, and healing because we’re the generation who is being woken up by brothers and sisters who didn’t just have a bad dream, but who actually lived through a nightmare.

How we respond to their cries will determine when the nightmare can finally end.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

It’s early in the morning and everyone in my house is still sleeping. I woke up hours ago. That’s pretty typical in our family. It seems that I’ve always been the early riser in the bunch. But in light of the realities currently facing our country, I feel like I’m the one waking up later.

The funny thing is that you don’t even know you’re asleep until you wake up and realize that you’ve been asleep. Even crazier is the fact that when some people sleepwalk, you and I would swear that they’re awake. The stories I could tell you about the sleepwalking episodes in my family alone would prove that true. And yet, sleepwalkers are, in fact, sleeping.

I think I’ve been sleepwalking around racism and the racial tensions and injustices in our nation. I’d see the videos and hear the names – Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, among others – and if you had asked me if I was outraged, I think I would have said I was. Emphasis on the word “think.”

And then George Floyd happened. Or rather, the same thing happened to George Floyd. I sat in the room where I spend my early mornings with Jesus and pulled up a video that I was already telling myself couldn’t be as bad as what it sounded like. And then I watched. I wept. I listened to his cries for help. For air. For his mother. I heard the cries of people begging the officer to check him for a pulse. To notice that he was no longer moving. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to jump through the screen. I wanted someone to do something. And in that dimly lit room, watching the sun rise as I watched a life fade, I woke up.

Admittedly, I may still be sitting on the side of my bed stretching and rubbing my eyes, but something shifted in me – and I think, in our country – as I watched George Floyd die. Something that was bigger than color, or slogans, or hashtags. This was un-human and it caused many of us to lift our sleepy heads, look into the mirror, and see the horror of who we have become and who we are becoming.

Most of us remember the unity that we all felt in the days following the horrific attacks on September 11, 2001. We heard the stories of brave men and women who entered burning buildings to save others at the cost of their own lives. One story emerged of Todd Beamer’s final words as he and others prepared to take the plane back from the hijackers. They were few – and the last two were simply, “Let’s roll.”

This past weekend, I walked the streets of my town with a hundred or so others and I listened to them chant: “I can’t breathe. No justice – No peace. Black lives matter. All lives matter. Say his name: George Floyd.” What struck me as the chants echoed in the streets was how familiar they were. I’d heard these cries before – albeit with different names – and yet I felt like I was hearing them differently, like when someone talks to you as you wake up from a dream. It seems the words are a part of the dream until you realize they were the very words that woke you up.

[Tweet “We are the human race, and if the human race is to also be a humane race, it’s going to take all of us waking up and standing together.”]

It dawned on me that I had seen 9/11 as something that happened to us, but all the racial injustice as something that had been happening to them. But this isn’t a fight that only one group should fight, because this is a reflection of who we have become as a nation, as a culture, as a race. We are the human race, and if the human race is to also be a humane race, it’s going to take all of us waking up and standing together against the forces that want to divide us (and believe me, there are forces at work in the natural and spiritual that want to keep us at war – but that’s for another post at another time).

[Tweet “If one of us can’t breathe, then none of us can breathe.”]

If one of us can’t breathe, then none of us can breathe. And when we see it like that, staying asleep – even sleepwalking – is no longer an option. It’s time to wake up, get up, and speak up.

The issues of social injustice, systemic racism, and racial inequality are bigger than any one of us, and defeating them will require every one of us. It will require that “their” slogans become “our” cry. As I’ve said to many leaders of color in my own city, I am deeply grieved at how long it has taken me to wake up, but I’m awake now and I hear you. I see you. And if you’ll allow me, I will be with you.

[Tweet “The issues we’re facing are bigger than any one of us and defeating them will require every one of us.”]

It’s time for action, and because this is a defining moment when we – especially the we that is the beautiful mosaic of the Church – must rise together against the demonic forces at work to destroy us, I’d like to close with the powerful, resolute, final words spoken by Todd Beamer:

“You ready. Okay, let’s roll.”