bible

Life Is Inconvenient (Fortunately, There Is Enough Grace)

Matthew 6:34 NIV
[34] Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Romans 15:1-2 NIV
[1] We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. [2] Each of us should please our neighbors for their good, to build them up.

The last 3 years have been a constant litany of things that I did not expect and certainly did not want.

The death of someone that everyone (including me) knew would outlive me. A seizure for no apparent reason. A second seizure caused by a wholly unique and unlikely chain of events that apparently had nothing to do with the first.

Masked symptoms of another ailment whose treatment could likely have killed me had it been discovered before the seizures (it’s complicated).

Early retirement (which frankly, was a blessing).

Massive renovations on 2 separate properties caused by alternately  a fire and a tornado.

And last night we lost power. Which happens a lot. I live in an outer suburb of Detroit. We have a lot of trees, which is lovely on the face of it. But when the wind blows, they fall. The wind has been blowing a lot lately because of decisions made a long time ago and gross negligence and inaction in the face of those decisions.

But that’s a discussion for another day.

Fortunately, we have a generator that powers most of the house. Unfortunately, the portion of the generator’s auxiliary circuit that powers the heat and well pump (yes, I live that far out) failed. So, no heat and no water this morning.

But I have resources. I’m expecting an electrician to come by in the next couple of hours and hopefully we’ll be up and running soon and the power company promises restoration by 3 pm. Meantime, I’m holed up in a local cafe, safe and warm, as I type this.

I’ve taken to saying that life is lived in the gaps between disasters. There is always a death on the way, a storm, a fire, a circuit failure. So best not to worry about it and enjoy yourself when you can.

But then what of the disasters? Aren’t they “life” too? We don’t just get to accept the “good parts” as “ours.”

I could raise my hands to the heavens and thank God for grace. And I do. I live in constant grace. If my understanding is correct, we all do.

But remember those resources? They make recovery a lot smoother. But for a lot of people, the “gap” between disasters can be a lot narrower, the effects markedly more severe.

Which means I have a responsibility to share my blessings with others.

Why not? I have more than enough.

Which is really sad when you think about it. Nobody has to suffer. There is more than enough to go around.

Yet so many are still left without because there are still so many of us who believe that what we have been blessed with is solely for us.

Blackness Is A Curse

The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.” – James Baldwin

In November of 2021 10-year-old Isabella Faith Tichenor, a Black middle schooler enrolled in the Davis school district, in Salt Lake City, Utah, took her own life after repeated racial harassment by her classmates. Davis schools, have a history of documented discriminatory practice. The most recent being called out in a Justice Department report in October of the same year. Yet nothing was done. No effort was made to address the concerns of her family and other black families in the district.

Because too many white people still believe that blackness is a curse.

I remember being told this in grade school by a white teacher. He didn’t necessarily support it, but he offered that there was a theory that blackness was “The Mark of Cain”. All of this ignores what we knew even then from the fossil record about human origins, but let’s just stay with the theological/literary aspects of the discussion for the moment.

I don’t recall mentioning it to my parents, or if I did, what they said.

Frankly, I don’t remember much of a fuss. I’d internalized so much anti-black orthodoxy by that age, it was just another data point.

But I was also a kid that did the reading. Genesis 4:14-15 reads:
“But the Lord said to him, “Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.” Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him.”

I suggested later to this same teacher that blackness wasn’t a curse, but a warning against harm to Cain and his descendants. If this was true, what were we to make of slavery? To his credit, he allowed that America might be in trouble.

There have been some well-meaning white people who, through the years, have attempted to dispel my characterization of the “cursedness” of my skin tone. This is a mistake, because they are operating from the premise that I want to be like them or that I’m “just as good as them” or that my skin color is “equal” to theirs.

As if whiteness is the gold standard.

They are making the same mistake as my aforementioned schoolteacher. Whatever “curse” mentioned in the story of Cain had nothing to do with his appearance, rather it was on those that would do him harm. So it is with the curse of American Blackness. It has nothing to do with me or anyone who looks like me. Rather it is the sense of false superiority that white people hold over me and, most importantly, the way the embrace of white supremacy dehumanizes them to the point that white children could torment a Black child into committing suicide with the apparent tacit approval of all of the adults in their lives.

The curse of blackness does infinitely more harm to white people than it does to Black people.

Link to 2021 article:
Family mourns loss of 10-year-old Utah girl who died following reported bullying https://kutv.com/amp/news/local/family-mourns-loss-of-1