The Very Safest Place to Be

Beloved:

    A white Baptist preacher was doing his part in the Civil Rights Movement when he came to think his place wasn’t with the movement proper but with the white supremacists on the other side of town.  This news was not well received by his politically like-minded white friends (read liberals), but he believed Jesus had sent him.  So to the KKK meeting places he did carry himself to preach the gospel as he knew it.  Those folks were about as receptive as he thought they’d be, which wasn’t very, so the preacher ended up pretty lonely all around.  Except for being smack dab in the middle of God’s will which, as the missionaries of my childhood said, is always the very safest place to be.  I was grown before I knew the word safest means something altogether different to missionaries than to my fourteen-year-old self.  

    I took Brother to a Dragonfly off my shelf again hoping for some clarity in these days.  It did not disappoint.  Only humans do such terrible things to each other, Will Campbell wrote.  To make things right, we have to recognize the humanity in the terrorist as well as the terrorized.  Apart from life in Christ I have no idea how to begin.  A modern preacher reminded me this week that the wisest of us is never better than half right about the ways of God.  I should be so wise.  Our best hope is to pray, then pray some more.  Then hold hands and tell the truth with more humility than usual.  

    It’s raining, finally.  What a gift.  I pray the day finds you full of hope and courage as we seek to be his people.  

~peace and prayers,
pastor annette