A lyric from “Us For Them,” a powerful song from the “One Wild Life: Soul”album, a trilogy of albums
Gungor is releasing this year exploring the trichotomy of soul, spirit, and body within humanity, and it’s
relation to faith (and every other thing, in fact) within our complex world.
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Note: I have been traveling for work for the past several weeks, and therefore unable to post my writing when it was initially conceived. The following blog was written out of an iMessage conversation with several of my oldest friends in California the night of the murder of 5 Dallas, Texas police officers as a “response” to the recent violence against African Americans by uniformed police officers. Regardless of ‘immediate response,’ the underlying issues of a disproportionate prejudicial response to African Americans by the police is statistically true, and more than deserving of a thoughtful, action-oriented response that mutes the violence plaguing America, and much of the rest of the world in respect to the law and its citizens’ safety.
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I don't know my thoughts tonight.
I know that it's surreal to me that I literally left for South Africa the day after Obama was inaugurated in 2009 and that I have watched his entire presidency (and the US as a whole) "from afar" these last 7.5 years (!). I have been asked innumerable times by South Africans and non-Americans to comment as the token American – sometimes jokingly, often shockingly seriously – on issues as complex as to why the US killed Bin Laden, to why Trump is an actual presidential nominee, to why such a "liberal" president like Obamahas been so aggressive with drone usage – just your run of the mill simple geopolitical answers, you know?
I have no real answers for those very pertinent questions.
I have been asked as a follower of Christ why so many Christians seem to be some of the most intolerant, hateful, hypocritical, judgmental people alive. Why so many people hate Muslims, or Middle Easteners, or legal immigrants, etc. or ...
...And I still have no real answers for those very real questions.
I realise and want to own (even though the implications imply real transformation of thought and action) my own implicit economic privilege, bias, racist, sexual, religious, ethnocentric, and religious privilege as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Christian American male who was raised in a wildly free area of California in an unprecedented time of peace and prosperity, at least relative to me.
But I have to admit I am scared to do so, although I don't know why.
Perhaps this fuzzy, diffused fear holds a lot of us back?
I do feel we have stepped way past the tipping point already, at least within America, and I mean that on all fronts: racial, sexual, historical, religious, "America's standing as the moral police of the world." In many ways, especially as an American living overseas married to an African with a daughter who is a dual-citizen of two worlds (South African and American passports!), this makes me grateful, as my world is increasingly complex nuances of grey, an endless palette of muted shades that has come from moving into the liminal space of a "third culture" family (Google the term). But this gratitude is tempered by the (at times like this) frightening reality that endless shades of grey require hard work, the patience to listen for understanding, even when nothing else makes sense, and that our world (and the Image Bearers that fill all corners of it) is begging for compassion, justice, and love more than ever before in my short life.
I hope that perhaps I can be a small answer to the systemic problems I have hinted at above, and know this starts with me at the most intimate of levels:
how I choose to listen to my wife even when I don't understand or even value what she is saying
how I choose to stay present with my 2 year-old daughter, even when her endless requests drive me insane
how I choose to cultivate intentional friendships with those who are "other" than me in faith, race, gender, sexuality, power, role, culture, etc. – for no other purpose other than the fact that we share humanity in all of its dignity and in all of its brokenness, together.
I hope Mia tells her children stories of this era of our family's story and the stories she tells are filled with the small acts of courage that never will make a trending topic on Twitter but are the very fabric of our shared humanity. Basically, I want change to start – and to last – with myself first, and to then ripple concentrically outwards in compassionate response to my wife, child, family, friends, neighbours, and"world."
I am realising more so than ever before that the minute amount of control I have to affect lasting
transformation begins and ends with me.
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An Important Postscript:
#blacklivesmatter: I stand with you in solidarity, my dear brothers and sisters.
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