Names

"What's their name?"

It's a common enough phrase at the ends of bible studies or small groups or any church community meetings where prayer requests are shared and taken. It was one of the first ways I learned to be unselfish, the taking down of names. So-and-so's second cousin who has a broken ankle is just the object of another sentence that I have to wait through before I can speak to my pain and grief and annoyance and ask for blessings. But Amelia's cousin Jeremy who works in landscaping and really can't afford to have to take the time off because of his broken ankle is a person, a living, breathing individual who I can pray for and who, if I have the means, I can assist and care for. Taking down a name is one of my earliest spiritual disciplines.

There is power in names. You're given one shortly after you enter this world and your name still exists after you've left it, buried somewhere in paperwork or engraved on a tombstone or held in the hearts of those who loved you. Naming someone in your prayers brings that power to the fore and calls God to accountability for this person. You connect to this person, even if it's the thinnest of threads, the most easily broken. It's not some girl who just had a baby-- it's Anna. You know Anna. Or you can imagine Anna. By naming her, you connect to her.

This is why we say their names. To humanize, to connect, to make just another black male killed by police an actual person in our minds. Keith Lamont Scott. Terence Crutcher. Two names on the litany that we should saying to ourselves every night, calling God to accountability for. Two more people who are never coming home again. Two more human lives lost among a system that has taught us to fear humans because the color of their skin, to speed up as we walk down the street or be too quick on the trigger rather than seeing the person who owns that skin. How long does the litany need to be? How many names? How many people?

Pray with me, my brothers and sisters. Pray in earnest. Say their names and call their memories up before the Almighty. Because when you do, when you come to God with prayers for these people, for this nation, for these times, when you say their name to make God accountable for the tragedy that we live in, participate in, benefit from, defend daily, I truly believe that God will move your heart. God will transform you.

God will let you know that you are accountable. You are meant to have kept your brothers and sisters as brothers and sisters. We have not done that. We have not done that.

When God changes you, when your heart is broken for these people, for their families, for their communities, come talk to me. Let's talk about police training. Let's talk about caring for our officers who mean to keep us safe. Let's talk about supporting police departments. Let's talk about building communities. Let's talk about the ways we can work on changing the human heart. To steal a phrase from a friend, let's together learn repentance and patience and grace so that we can reframe how we understand force and power and authority. Let's figure out which leaders are going to build bonds between people. Let's talk about the people who have been taken from us and let's treat every life like it belongs to a name rather than a number on a statistician's sheet.

Ask for their names. Preserve their lives. Live in this world with these people and love them deeply because they are people. Because they have names. Because they matter.

Start at the Beginning

I know, I know, I said that I'd have a post about what I'm learning for you every Friday. But I also want to make my creative projects work for me and that means every other Friday, I'll be posting my Vlogyries video on here in place of a text post because videos take time and my videos are rarely if ever uninfluenced by what I'm studying. So here, at the beginning of a new semester, is a reflection on beginnings, influenced by some of what I've learned in my Spiritual Formation for Ministry class and some conversations I've had with friends as the year begins.

Life and Lessons

A couple of housekeeping things before I get to the meat of the matter:

1. In the midst of job hunting and classes starting and Labor Day, my car broke down and I had life to deal with, so I missed a couple of posts. Sorry, team. 
2. For those of you who don't know, I'm in my third week of classes at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. I'm in the Master of Divinity (Mdiv) program, which is a three-year program that covers the basics of biblical studies, church history, theology, and ecclesiology. You know, all the stuff you want your pastor to know. Wesley is a United Methodist seminary and for ordination in the UMC, you need an Mdiv (typically). So stay tuned on all of that. 
3. As soon as all the paperwork clears, I'll be doing a more or less full-time internship alongside my five classes this fall semester. I imagine things will be busy but I do want to maintain the discipline of writing something each week. My goal is to write a post about what I'm learning for each Monday and a post about my life/what I'm feeling each Wednesday. Those may drop off as the workload amps up but that's the goal. 
4. Has anyone told you today that you're beautiful and you matter? Because you are and you do. Be affirmed, friend! 

And now, on with the post! 

***

I take almost everything in life as a lesson. Any big life event is not only an opportunity to learn something new about myself but also a chance to listen with intention for the message I'm receiving about my role in the world. I don't want this to come across as overly fideistic or moralistic or spiritual. I'm not preaching here, or trying to set an example. This is just how I live my life amidst all the chaos and bullshit and things I can't control. I can control this. I can control how I react. I can learn from the curveballs and fast balls and the occasional sweet pitch that sings right to where your bat wants to be. I can learn from the ones that earn you a walk.

Like when the car broke down. There were ten kinds of divine providence smiling down on me that fay, from the people who gave my car a jump in NC to the fair weather on the roads on the way up to the small miracle that was pulling into a gas station that happened to have a service center with remarkably kind people only a mile or so from my apartment. The car could have died in Charlotte and needed a tow back to Hickory, leaving me stranded seven hours away from where I needed to be. The engine could have whirred its last on some backroads highway in Virginia with no cell service. I could have decided to go somewhere else for gas and ended up paying for a tow and an impound fee. I could have decided to drive it to my apartment and ended up with a lifetime's supply of parking tickets. 

Through the whole thing, I learned stuff, like exactly where the alternator is and what happens when the engine mount breaks and how a tow truck hooks up to a vehicle. I learned (again) that I don't like depending on others, that I take every kindness thrown my way as unimaginable grace, that I'm uncomfortable with the impact of the whims of fate, and that I don't know how to treat those emotions and thoughts. Do I really think so little of my person and so much of the space that it occupies that I can't ask for a little help now and then? What's my deal with being unwilling to accept kindness? Do I really need so impenetrable a shield as that? And what use is that shield when forces outside my control dictate the terms of my response anyway?

When we went to orientation at Wesley, the first thing we really did was have a worship service. Now, I love me some singing and some responsive reading and a good word or two preached. But they asked us to hold hands during one song and I stepped on away. I do not hold hands with strangers. And they asked us to come up and dip our hands in the font and remember our baptism and I did not want to do that. I can remember my baptism from back here, thanks. I do not want to walk up in front of this group of people that I do not know and participate in a symbolic gesture of a faith that I hold to be deeply personal. It's been rocky sometimes and no amount of remembering a dedication to Christ that I didn't ask for is going to help with that, or at least, it's not going to help within the fifteen minute space of the end of this service. If I go up to that font, I am going to sob like a child in front of all of these people who will not understand my tears.

I went up anyway.

It was a barrier that had to come down sooner or later and it may as well have been sooner. I participated. I was next to last in line and I splashed my hands around in the fountain because if God's not a God of joy in creation, I may as well go home now. I let this part of the service work for me. I let a community start to love me and I started to believe that they would shoulder my burdens with me. Then after that, we all hugged our way through passing the peace. I swear, hugging is a spiritual discipline on its own. I marvel at people who can just casually go up and share space with another person like that. Is your love for all humanity really of that easy depth? Why isn't mine? Do I want it to be? 

I know that I do community differently at the beginning of my stay somewhere than I do by the end. We all do. I have friendships already and I want to put time into maintaining them; I want what already happened in my life to continue to matter. So even watching television becomes a social experience, with long conversations and all caps reactions. I know my friends on the other side of the screen and they know me. They get me. They support me. We're already invested in each other. It makes me tired to think about putting that work in again in a new place where I have to spend the majority of my effort pretending that I've found my footing months before I actually will have. Anyone who's met me in real life in the past couple of weeks has not gotten my level best. There's just too much else to be worried with. 

But you get what you put in, I suppose. You only learn the lessons if you're looking for them and you generally only form relationships if you ante up. Besides, my car's dead. If there was ever a sign from the heavens that I should stay put for a while, it's that. Cars are complex systems. It's easy to read divine intervention into the perceived spontaneous mechanical failure. Now all I need is for the internet to go out and maybe that'll jump start this whole friend process.

(Dear God, please don't let the internet go out. A car I can live without. The internet is a completely different story.)