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Quarantimes

As we sit in quarantine, watching the number of daily case count in the USA rise up higher than any day so far in this pandemic, I have had plenty of time to read on the dock and rest (Ike rests and then can't help but do physical labor everywhere we go). 

I just finished "The Girl Who Smiled Beads" by Clemantine Wamariya today. A story of a Rwandan girl who fled to America as a refugee at age 12 after SEVEN years of running for safety with her older sister. They ran in and out of Burundi, Zaire (now Congo), Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, and South Africa over those seven years - via buses, boats, cars, or on foot. She was six when she ran out of her grandmother's back door with her sister to avoid danger and never came back. She was reunited with her parents and new younger siblings on OPRAH while the entire nation watched (can you imagine being her in that scene? Just feeling like a spectacle?). She fears being left behind, being forgotten because of how much they were on the move. She walks into new rooms and does periphery glances for the best options for emergency exits, ya know just in case. 
Can you imagine the heavy burden of carrying those seven years around for the rest of your life? Can you imagine making life or death decisions at the age of 6, 7, 8? 
I can't. 
This wasn't the feel good refugee turned successful American narrative that I have read before. This was the raw, open wounds of a person who has been broken by their past and struggling to recover for the future. 

She made it out, she survived, she made it to America and she can even write a book to tell of her story but in the end she is still haunted by her past, by a childhood was striped from her, by her mother knowing nothing of the terrible things she experienced, by her fellow sojourner refusing to tell the story the same way as she does. She is successful - but under the surface its painful. She ends the book with the words "No ending ever felt right. History made it hard." 
In some small ways her story parallels the one that is wrecking America right now. The story of false hope, thinking you've made it only to receive the other side wasn't greener - slavery ending yet really just continuing under a different name. America is seeing that our history has made this hard, no matter how we slice it this pie has been unequal for far too long. 
I think one refreshing ideal I have seen emphasizes that choosing to be anti-racist is a work in progress. It doesn't mean you clicked a button and got rid of all your racial bias/thoughts/jargon, it means you are actively choosing to do better, to learn and listen, to change, and to ask God to search out the offensive ways in our hearts. I think that seeing the human in front of you as a human is essential. Whether you are in health care, education, construction, art, I don't care, it is essential to see the person you are present with as a human first. A human with needs, with a heart, with a past that might make them ache, with a future that makes their face light up. 

Interestingly, Wamariya tells a story towards the end of the book of when she and her mother are looking at the painting of the Wedding Feast at Cana in the Louvre. Her mom thinks it looks like heaven but she see the people of color painted in poor light and thinks it looks terribly wrong. The small black boy under the table by the dog. She yells "That painting is telling him his place! I want him at the table, sitting next to Jesus." 
Although in the book, the author has an aversion to Christianity, maybe because of its ties to colonialism and racism (the Belgians divided the nation of Rwanda into tribes, then exited only to leave the tribes to destroy each other causing the genocide), she plainly states she wants this small black child right up next to Jesus. She plainly says - in heaven, Jesus would have pulled the kid right up next to him. 

Do I treat every person I meet with that same sentiment? 
With the desire to put them right up there, brushing elbows with Jesus at a meal? Folding them into community, into the action?


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