Change
Let me tell you what this is.
This is water poured over a chalk message.
I watched a wiry woman with a brown-gray ponytail CARRY A BUCKET OF WATER FROM HER HOUSE NEARBY onto the Greenbelt Trails in order to toss the water the over the message. The message was large, and I was clearly seeing the final bucket of many.
When you run in the Texas heat, your thoughts move slowly…so it took me just a bit, after I passed the woman, to sort it all out in my head. Was she? Was that really? Did it say?
After I sorted it all out,
I turned around and went back.
Back to talk to the woman.
Because the words she was trying to wash away were…
YOU CANNOT SILENCE US. #BLM – GENZ
I’m a grown woman. I know there are always back stories. And that’s one of the things I wanted to ask her, the back story. Had she tangled with the neighborhood GenZs? Had she been called Boomer one time too many?
OR
Did her anger run, not superficially, but deeper?
The woman is gone.
And I am upset.
And angry.
“This?” I ask, looking down at the water-covered message.
“This is what we’ve come to?”
My messy emotions about the coronavirus and masks, the things I’ve learned because of the protests, the division I’ve seen in this country…all those emotions dump themselves into this moment. This moment where an angry woman would carry buckets of water from her home to wash away a message written in different shades of pastel chalk…
I try to imagine Jesus of Nazareth standing at my side. Not the Jesus they told you about in church when it got mixed in with other messages He never wanted offered in His name…but something like the Jesus in The Chosen TV Series.
Jesus looks down at the message with me.
“Hmm.” He says. “Do you think she silenced them?”
He catches me off-guard. I laugh. My messy emotions dissipate.
“No, I don’t think she did,” I answer Him.
He smiles and we walk on.
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I try to be careful when I write, I try to be sensitive to all the different places people might be coming from emotionally and spiritually when they read my words. But once in a while I give myself permission to be blunt. I always warn you first. I’m warning you now. Today I am going to be blunt:
Friends.
Change IS coming.
Good change.
And we will not
(thank God!)
be able
to silence it.