Day 60: Fighting for Breath

Everyone who hates his brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him. This is how we have come to know love: He laid down his life for us. We should also lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has this world’s goods and sees a fellow believer in need but withholds compassion from him—how does God’s love reside in him? 1 John 3:15–17

During the first summer of COVID-19, I was standing outside my friend Shardey’s salon because social distancing parameters only allowed for one person to be inside with the stylist at any given time. So my beautiful brown-skinned daughter was in there with Shardey, happily waving at me through the window, thoroughly enjoying the air conditioning while she got her gorgeous, curly hair braided. And there I was: outside in the Tennessee heat, sweating like a sumo wrestler in a sauna on that muggy, early summer morning!

Truth be told, I was actually grateful for that hour of physical separation from Missy because my heart was shredded in the wake of yet another black man killed by unwarranted police brutality, not to mention the national outrage and division it’s caused. In this case, a man in Minneapolis named George Floyd died after being arrested on the suspicion that he’d tried to use a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill to purchase cigarettes at a nearby convenience store. Following a 911 call reporting a suspect that matched Mr. Floyd’s description, police officers pulled him out of his van, and one held him down on the ground, with his knee in Mr. Floyd’s neck. This compromised his air supply for almost nine minutes.

Mr. Floyd’s cries, “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” got weaker and weaker while bystanders pleaded with the officer to quit choking him since he was lying on the ground moaning, obviously not resisting arrest.

I firmly believe that most folks in our police forces around the country are good and decent human beings who choose to pursue a career in civil service because they feel called to protect their fellow citizens from harm and ensure public safety. Often at the risk of their own lives. Yet at the same time, I believe there are also a few rotten apples in every institution. Because sin lies in every human heart, and by extension, in every single system human beings create. Fallen people create fallen groups of people, which creates fallen institutions. Even in so-called good groups of people, ones that God deems important and necessary and valuable, we will still find fallenness on full display. A badge can’t make someone intrinsically good any more than ethnicity can make someone intrinsically bad. God doesn’t declare us good or bad based on the group we belong to or our vocational training; it’s the posture of our hearts before Him that counts. The bottom line is: every group, no matter who they are or why they exist, has unredemptive elements represented within it. And it’s really, really hard when you see unredeemed, rotten behavior carried out, isn’t it? Especially when it harms a person who looks a lot like your own daughter.

I needed time alone in the parking lot to weep and wail and beseech God for mercy on behalf of other moms and dads of beautiful brown children who’ve stopped waving back happily because they’ve come to the sober realization that they live in a world where they have to be wary just to stay alive. Just to breathe.

Regarding the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel wrote, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”11 I don’t have any new wisdom to share regarding how to eradicate the systemic evil of racism, but I’m committed to listen and learn and look at what’s really going on. And I’m committed to stand up—shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand—with my friends, my daughter, and all other image-bearers for their right to breathe. Racism is real. It’s the antithesis of the Gospel, which brings all ethnicities together under the banner of Christ. Yes, rottenness and racism are alive and well. But love has the power to overcome it.

• Have you (or any of your loved ones) been abused, ridiculed, oppressed and/or treated unfairly because of your/their ethnicity?
• If so, how did you/they respond?
• What steps are you currently taking to help put a stop to racism, bigotry, and ethnic oppression in your corner of the world? What might it look like for you to show others what being united in Christ looks like in a world of division?