Finding the gold

Typically when I have something in my head that I need to write, I am able to sit down at my computer and the words flow through my fingers and over the keyboard like water.

Some days the flow is like the deluge of rain from a sudden summer storm.

At other times it’s like light sprinkles that take time to turn into a steady rain.

Over this past week, the words have rested in my head and in my heart like in a dark storm cloud on the horizon, heavy with meaning and threatening in intensity, yet slow to release the cleansing flood that washes away the dust and releases the pressure that has been building up in the atmosphere.

So many thoughts and feelings have swirled through my head and settled uneasily into my heart over the past two weeks. Some I want to dwell on and revisit, some I want to leave without making their indelible impression upon my soul.

I’ve sat at my computer on more than one occasion to try to put the thoughts and feelings into words, as a way of processing what they mean, and, through saying them aloud, remove the power they hold over me. Each time, I have given up, in weariness and frustration. In sadness of being unable to do what usually comes so easily to me. To paint a picture with words of what dwells in my heart and in my mind.

Finally, last night, I saw this photo posted by a sweet co-worker who lived alongside me last week the experience that leaves me with so many of the feelings that trouble my soul. Feelings of frustration and anger. Feelings of injustice and aggravation. Feelings of being misunderstood and mistreated. Feelings of fear and apprehension about decisions made out of our control, and despite our best efforts, and our hardest and most heartfelt work.

What I felt last week, over the weekend, and this week has had a lot to do with hate and very little to do with love. Hate for the things that drugs do to people and the things it makes them do to others. Hate directed toward me for the stance I took and the steps I took to protect that stance. Hate directed at me because of the color of my skin, deriving from a hate developed from having received it too many times because of the color of theirs. Hate of a world where babies are broken beyond repair by parents rendered impatient and enraged by the effect of drugs and parental influence. Hate of a world where pre-teen boys are starved and left to die alone by parents too preoccupied with their own needs and desires and self-imposed obligations to worry about the needs of their special need child. Hate of a world where two loving friends cannot dance together in public because it isn’t safe to do so because of people’s closed minds and closed hearts.

But through it all, I keep playing back a conversation between my pastor and a colleague, told by her to a group of 23 people, not long ago strangers, bound together by a common desire to love and support one another in who God made them to be. She told of a visit to an elderly church member who, as they left, told them she loved them. Of the teary response of the colleague who questioned, “How can she love me when she just met me?” And the response of my pastor of “That’s how we do church.”

And in response to all the hate of the past 2 weeks, I strive to do church in that way. Each and every day. Inside those church walls and out.

To love those that I have just met.

To love those who choose to hate.

To love those who might not live the way I do, look the way I do, or love the way that I do.

To pour that love out onto the world like a drenching rain onto a parched and cracked earth.

And to find the gold instead of the dirt.