Racism

1971 in Wichita was a time of racial tension like everywhere else in the nation. It was the year that I was bused to Ingalls Elementary at the corner of 10th & Grove, in the middle of a predominantly black neighborhood. I was in 6th grade and it was my favorite year. I had the greatest teacher ever and my Mom taught first grade downstairs at the end of the long Kindergarten/First Grade hall. All those tiny people in room 119 thought I was the coolest thing ever. And I loved being near my Mom all day. One of my fondest memories was the morning I got to work crossing patrol on the corner where someone had been shot the night before. Standing with my orange Crossing Patrol sash across my flat chest and the hand-held Stop sign in my authoritative grip, I was the tour guide that morning of the dried blood still in the street. It was awesome.

It never occurred to me to be afraid that morning, or any other morning. Playing on the playground, walking out to one of the four corners for crossing duty, getting into Mom's car or the bus at the end of the day, I never felt I was in danger. My Mom had been teaching at this school for years and nothing bad had ever happened to her that I knew of. She must have been scared after the shooting. I saw different colors of people, but those differences held no more meaning for me than the difference in the color of my bedroom walls from the color of my sisters' bedroom walls. Clothes, furniture, cars, books, flowers, trees and bugs were different colors. It seemed so obviously natural that people were different colors, too, that I didn't register the fuss going on in the nation.

I had two best friends that year. One was Leanne Ogle. She was skinny like me, but brunette. We'd get to school and trade left shoes so we'd walk around all day with mismatched matching pairs. Hidden in our desks from the watchful eye of Mr. Schneidewind were the people we made out of Bugles corn chips, glue, yarn and googly eyes. Sometimes Leanne came to my house after school. We'd ride the bus to my neighborhood on afternoons my Mom left school to go to her second job at Lewin's Fine Women's Wear in the mall. A few times I'd go to Leanne's house on Fridays so I could spend the night. My other friend was Sadie. She was chubby, not like me, and had black kinky hair that shined. Sadie came to my house once that I remember. She gave me a poster of a woman with a parasol sitting in a boat on a serene lake surrounded by willows. She said it had reminded her of me. She and I put it up with tacks on the only wall in our unfinished basement that wasn't concrete. I kept that poster for years, remembering what it felt like to be loved by someone as kind and sweet as Sadie.

The following school year I attended Truesdell Junior High, or True Hell, as it was better known. Truesdell was near my neighborhood, so this time it was the black kids who got bused to us instead of us to them. I think I was afraid most of the time. Afraid I'd forget where my locker was. Afraid of forgetting my combination. Afraid I'd fail Spanish. Afraid of gym class where I'd have to unclothe my frighteningly thin, prepubescent body in front of girls with breasts and change into the ugly green bubble shorts and matching short sleeved shirt. Everyone said I looked like a toothpick stuck in an olive. I hated 7th grade.

Truesdell was the loneliest and most crowded school I'd ever been in. There were hundreds of students and I missed my Ingalls friends. I missed having a friend to share shoes and Bugles with. I missed knowing my classmates and having friends. Leanne was running with different girls and we hardly ever saw one another. I didn't have the one close friend that I needed in this giant hormone confused rat race. And then I saw Sadie. She was the most beautiful thing I'd seen all year; a serene, beautiful lake surrounded by willows. I greeted her with open arms and a smile so big my face hurt. But she didn't reciprocate. Her greeting was restrained and cool. She had a painful kind of sadness in her eyes. We saw each other a few more times in the halls after that, but something was different and she never wanted to stop for long. I guess I thought she had just made different friends, like Leanne.

I don't remember when in the year this horrible thing happened. But it came one day during that in-between class rush. Long hallways, classes miles apart, hundreds of students all rushing to get where they needed to be before the dreaded bell. Thwack! I was hit on the back of the head by something hard. Turning to see who or what, continuing in my rush to get to the next class, I saw a girl much bigger than me. She had 3 or 4 friends attached to her, like extensions of herself, and they were all laughing at me. This big girl, with hate in her eyes and a face I did not know, had hit me. I had never been hit before. Shock, embarrassment and fear all flooded up but there was no time to think about it. I had to get to class. Every day after that I fully expected another hit from behind. I became more afraid, not knowing where or when she was waiting to jump out and beat my skinny, little body into a pulp. I didn't know this girl and her posse of friends who hated me for a reason I couldn't understand, but I did fear them.

Colors were everywhere. The pale white skin of my Spanish teacher's complexion. The ugly green of my gym uniform. The blue of the lock whose combination I feared would allude me. The browns, blacks, whites, tans and olives of the skins of the hundreds of students at True Hell. We were just different colors, like everything else in life. And then I spoke to Sadie one last time.

It was in a different long, gray, student-filled hallway between classes. Sadie and I were standing face to face. "Shannon, I can't be friends with you anymore." A sharpness stabbed my heart and it grew heavy with a weight I did not know. I'd had plenty of painful moments by the time I was 12. Plenty of pain. My pets dying, my Dad leaving again and again, the loneliness of being the youngest. But the words she spoke next added a new, pressing weight to my heart and pushed me forever away from my innocent view of race. I came face to face with the ugly, irrational, stupidity of racism. "I can't be friends with you because I'm black and you're white." And it was then that I saw them. About 20 feet away behind Sadie. The big girl that had hit me and her backup singers, glaring at me and at the back of Sadie's head. They had scared her too, and in order to survive this school, this True Hell, she had chosen to do as they said and get rid of her skinny, blond white friend.

As I thought about writing this piece this morning in my bathroom with the blow dryer pointed at my still (boxed) blond hair, I realized after 37 years that the last moment with Sadie still hurts and I miss her. But I think the tears that I push back now while I sit at my desk aren't just for Sadie or for me, but also for a world that I have believed should exist and doesn't yet.

Racism still comes in all the colors. I had hoped with the advances in science over these past decades, we'd all know by now that none of us are exactly the same color, while at the same time we're all made up of the same exact stuff. Race still becomes a conversation during elections. Color is the blame for countless hurts and failures. A kid in my son's Junior class has just started a teacher-sanctioned "Southern Gentleman's Society". Most of the kids understand that its really KKK Light, but this kid has snowed all the teachers and administration into letting him start his little 'whites only' club. What do I do with that. What do I do with the injustice and stupidity. What do I do with my outrage. I feel as helpless as the day I realized that I was white and there were people who hated me because of it. I hated 7th grade and I still hate the day Sadie's fear mixed with the tension of the times and I was forced to see that something big, ugly and powerful lived and would probably not breathe its last in my lifetime. But it was also the day that my black friend saved me from any more harm. Those girls who hated my skin never bothered me again. Thank you, Sadie.

Walking Backward

I left Kansas in 1981 with all my essential possessions crammed in the back of my 1970's, sun-oxidized silver Toyota Celica. Headed for Texas, I left my books, much-loved stuffed animals and assorted memorabilia to gather dust in my 1960's groovy lime green and navy blue room. Driving away from my Mother and the house in which I'd grown up was nearly the hardest thing I had done up to that point in my life, but I had to move out and try to separate from the pain of the past. I had to make a fresh start and I desperately prayed that I was leaving Kansas forever.

Regardless of that prayer, Kansas has never let me fully leave. It sticks to the story of my life like a piece of spinach in my teeth. Kansas; with its Dorothy & Toto jokes, supposedly flat nothingness and "flyover state" status. I even met a woman who remarked that "everyone she's met from Kansas was so backward!" And she was from Lubbock. But more than the cultural labels that Kansas counters with farmer-like quiet dignity, the pain of bad choices, mine and others, remained to follow me from that great state of buffalo and sunflowers. Kansas has just meant pain.

Ever since leaving, I have been on a journey to overcome and be set free from the Kansas I saw in my past, but no more so than over the past two years. Part of this desert experience has been about going backward into that pain and watching Jesus pick up each memory and, in ways only He could pull off, begin to heal and redeem. He's used the book my sister wrote of her journey back through Kansas to put the pieces of her fragmented childhood together. He's used Facebook to reconnect me with friends from the high school I bailed on my Junior year and the other high school I barely graduated from. I realize as I write this, these steps leading to memory after memory, some long forgotten, some unforgettable, are through the mountains I saw off in the distance last year as I stood in this spiritual desert, having just sat my behind next to a rock for about a year. I knew eventually that through these shadowed mountains was the path that led out of this place I'd grown to love.

I read recently that some cultures believe we look to the past we can see and have our backs to the future we cannot see; that we walk backward into what's next. I've been walking backward, with my eyes viewing what's past and with each step of healing, I've seen Kansas grow more and more beautiful, and can honestly say that I am grateful for every moment of my life there. Even the horrible, terrible moments were steps that brought me to this place with this Jesus. I have many more steps to trace over, with countless moments of pain to relive, but I'm ready.

Ready to go again, backward.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
~ TS Eliot ~

Mandate of the Manatee

I can't explain why, but I absolutely love Manatees. With their large, white, squishy bodies, their adorably ugly faces, and the way they live their lives as though they completely understand the Shalom of Christ. The peaceful floating blobs of love and wonder.

I think about Manatees and their fragile, peaceful lives. I think about the scars they carry from the blades of boat motors and how each scar on each manatee makes them unique from every other manatee. I think about how those scars, long healed, will be part of who they are until they die. And still the Manatee swim about in their peaceful manner, seeming to accept the wounds as a part of life, a part of who they are and they aren't bothered by any of it.

Have I become so emotionally attached to my scars that I pretend the pain never happened? Do I let the pain determine who I am and how I'll live with other people? Do I offer advice to others to not dwell on their pain, get past it, get over it.

I want to be like the Manatee, where the Peace of Jesus defines who I am, and the scars that I carry only allow me to know that while I'm like every other human on the planet, I am also unique. Hurt will come and scars will form, but despite them, I pray that I can still rest and float and be at peace. The scars don't define who I am, they only mark the places I've been in the river.

Life Without Peaches

I call her my best friend, which is completely true, but she's so much more than that. Like Milky Way big more than that. She's the honey in my tea, the bean in my green, the fruit of my womb and she's 1,800 miles away, living out the as-near-as-perfect Freshman year of college that either of us ever dreamed possible. Pert Near Perfect. And I miss her. My soul has a hole that aches for her everything. I miss her smell, her laugh, the way she gets silly and sits upside down on the couch. I miss the brilliance of her thoughts and the depths of her insight. I miss the moments when she goes blond and says something totally stupid. I miss walking next to her and beaming with pride that she is so loved by so many and at the same time a mystery so worthy of the X-Files that it scares some off. I miss the way she can go to the refrigerator, pull out 5 random ingredients and make something unique and delicious. I miss her knocking on the bedroom wall at night to tell me to be quiet. I miss listening to her morning routine and the way she'd leave her room in a clutter. I miss nagging at her to clean up the mess she made in the kitchen/living room/dining room/library. I miss wondering when she's coming home from a day at the lake with her friends. I miss wondering if she's had an accident and lying dead in a ditch. Because they're always dead in a ditch if they're late. I miss the kettle whistling for 5 minutes because she forgot she was making tea. I miss road trips and shopping trips and girl lunches and chick flix. I miss having this other girl in the house that is so like me that I don't feel the least bit odd or weird or crazy because there are two of us almost exactly alike and that must mean we're OK.

Those nearly 19 years flew by like the hummingbird, Tweedle Dum, that stops by the feeder. When she was born, they/them told me that it would go by so fast and to appreciate every minute. Yea, right. There was that day when I just knew she was going to be Three and screaming at me F O R E V E R. But they/them were right. Before I blinked she was gone. All grown up. Living her own life and taking over the world.

I am immensely, hugely, ginormously, profoundly proud of her and all I can pray is that we will remain BFs forever. I love you, Face.

Earth Turn

I watched the earth turn this morning. I could say I watched the sunrise, but that wouldn't be true. Being slightly ADD, a label placed on those of us with brains that work at the speed of light, part of my brain wanders around asking questions about the weirdest stuff. Stuff like; why are manatees so puffy, where do the rabbits that eat my garden sleep at night, what do the hummingbirds think my plastic plants will do for them and what's up with this sunrise thing. If the earth really does revolve around the sun and not the other way around, then the sun isn't rising or setting. It's just being. So what should I call that thing that happens in the morning, when the light of the sun reaches my upstairs deck with its fabulous view? All I could come up with was Earth Turn, but that sounds like some low-budget space movie from the 50's, not that there's anything wrong with that. If I really believe that the earth turns, then I feel like a liar when I call what I saw this morning the Sunrise. It didn't, so I can't and that's just it. So whatever happens every morning, and for that matter every night, is awesome and amazing and unique and it is one of the most delightful things God and I watch together. I'm thinking of taking a picture of every "sunrise" for a year, just to sit and wonder about how gifted God is at painting the sky. I wonder if God calls every "sunrise" by a different name, like He does the stars. Maybe that's why, despite my ability to give names to anything, I just can't figure out what to call the daily event of seeing the sun pop up over the horizon. For now, I'll call it Bob.

Mountains in the Distance

When this journey began it started in a desert that I couldn't see. Then I saw the desert I was sitting in and I didn't like it. I've never liked the desert. When my Mom planted Yucca and broom grass in the rock garden in the front yard of our Kansas home, convincing the neighbors that we didn't fit, I started hating the desert. Although I loved donning my leather moccasins that we bought in New Mexico and walking through the rocks and cactus, pretending I was an Indian, which is what you were in 1969, not a Native American, I was still a little embarrassed that our yard looked like Arizona and not Kansas. Pretty silly, really, considering I have been embarrassed to be from Kansas until just recently, so either way I lost. The desert is hot, dusty (i hate dust), rocky and so unkempt. I mean, clean it up once in a while, huh! Put those boulders in some kind of order for beauty's sake!

When I mean "I saw" I really did. One of my gifts, I guess you can call it, is the ability to see stuff that I can't see with my eyeballs. Call it an over-active imagination, but proven throughout my many years of following Christ, what I see seems to be what He's doing. So I saw myself in this desert, sitting near a saguaro cactus and a clump of untidy boulders, watching the sun bake the rocks and stick-like plants. Yucc-a.

Until one of the last Sundays I attended worship in the church we joined 6 years prior. It was that Sunday, when the din of the music accompanied by chatting pew sitters and wandering late-comers, truly pushed me over the edge and all I could think about was running. Running anywhere to find a quiet, lonely place where the hot wind was in my ears and I could feel the peace of sitting and watching the sun rest on the land.

Again, slow learner/late bloomer...Oh! That's the desert. I love the desert. I have to go to the desert. I want to go to the desert. If I don't get out of church and go to the desert I'm going to die.

So for months, I'd check in with God about where we were, because He eventually showed up to sit by my rocks with me, and He'd show me a non-eyeball picture of what was up. I sat by those boulders for months, maybe a year. I watched eagles soaring on the hot wind, lizards lounging on hot rocks, shadows move across the landscape. I noticed tiny, delicate flowers push their way up through the sand and dirt to face the blazing sun and thrive in it's heat. I began to understand words like peace, still, rest. I began to stop and look and wonder at the beauty of this place that I had dismissed for so long as ugly, dry and barren.

Recently, I checked in again. So, Guys (Father, Son, HS), where am I now? I am standing, no longer sitting by the boulders I had come to know and love, and facing mountains. They're still at a distance and I'm still in the desert, but no longer is just desert before my eyes. I see mountains. Green, gray, tall mountains with shadows crossing their ridges and peaks. I know we're headed there and part of me is scared. I've had to climb mountains before and it was hard and horrible. Part of me is excited about the new thing ahead of me and that Jesus and I are going to do this thing together. And part of me is very sad. Sad to leave this place I've grown to love so dearly because I took a journey here with Jesus for a long time now, even though I never moved an inch, and this place is very precious to me.

Whatever the mountains hold for me, however the climb will look, I know that Jesus is right there with me and the aloneness that I've felt all my life disappeared in the desert and I'll need to remember that when the climb gets hard.

Mustard Seeds

God is showing up everywhere these days. The grocery store, the tattoo studio, my hair lady's shop, Target, the gas station. It seems that where ever I go, there He is. Just like David wrote about in Psalms, there is nowhere that God isn't.

I find myself getting excited about going out of the house to run errands. And not just because I like buying fresh fruit and filling the fridge to make my family happy, but because I just love striking up conversations with people about anything. I used to freeze around "the lost" because I knew that my job, as a good Christian, was to share Christ, like He was a cake or something. What if they're on a diet? What if they don't like cake or are Gluten-intolerant? Then what? How do I bring Jesus into a conversation about the price of peaches? All this panic, geez! Now I just want to be kind, caring, open, fun and I've had the coolest conversations with people. So many that I've had cards with my contact info printed on them to give to these lovely nobodies (to borrow from Jim Palmer) in case they want to ever talk again.

This may be that Freedom that Jesus was setting me free for. I feel so much of His delight when I'm just being free to be me, that I feel delight in the people He runs me into. And my first thought or question isn't "where do you go to church?" It has ceased to matter to me. What matters is can I, just for this moment I'm with them, convey any of God's love and delight He has for them?

It surprises me every day, the things that don't freak me out anymore. Like when I found out that friends from the church I no longer attend think I've gone off the deep end. The only thing I felt was sad. Sad that I've been judged and labeled without one conversation taking place. Without one of these people calling me up to ask me about this journey God has me on. For all the years of serving, caring, coming alongside in community and only 7 people out of the hundreds I know have asked any caring, open questions about what's up, and they were the ones who asked me how it felt to have people think I've gone lefty-wacko nuts. If I had heard this a year ago, it probably would have thrown me in to that familiar pit of depression and self-doubt I have lived in for all my life. But I know beyond anything I've ever known that I didn't pick this journey, Jesus did, and He really knows what He's doing. Really. I wish my friends who don't ask could know that about Jesus. Know it enough to delight in whatever God is doing in someone else even if they don't get it.

I still freak out at times. I still find myself asking Jesus "so, how are you going to get me out of this fine mess?" and then freaking when He doesn't appear out of the magic bottle I just rubbed. Like the day we got the test results back for my son, who will be 15 in 11 days. Apparently he has Celiac disease and has had it for so long that my 5'10", 190 lbs. son is malnourished and his thyroid is out of wack. And he can never again eat gluten without causing severe damage to his body and immune system. But, it was the painfully embarrassing psoriasis that he's had for a year that God used to finally push me past traditional medicine (that wasn't working) into the food testing. That poor kid is allergic to 24 foods, a few of which are killing him. Now we get to wait to see what God's going to do with that as I clear out all the junk "food" and learn to cook for real this time.

Its the every moment, every day miracles that keep me amazed and living in expectancy for what God will do next in and through me. And I haven't picked up my Bible in months. Who knew that all the rules of being a good Christian and keeping God pleased were bogus. He really does delight in me, even if I never ever ever did anything for Him ever again. He really does order the steps of my path and it really is His job to perfect me into the image of Christ. Who knew that the things He said He really meant. For all the big plans and purposes that I'm supposed to have as a Christian, its been the everyday little things that seem to be making the most impact in my life and the lives of those I meet. Maybe that's what Jesus was talking about when He mentioned mustard seeds. If all I ever have are mustard seeds, then its enough to change the world.