Shadows

I walked to my friends’ house tonight.

I was going to do profitable things at home, but I heard a conversation about some people I have been called to love, and I was suddenly heavy.

I stopped on the Sherman Street bridge and rested my arms on the chain link fence. The wake of a speed boat now far down the river rippled against the ducks coasting along the shoreline, under the skeleton limbs of a dead tree. I had heard the boat roar under the bridge as I made the turn onto Sherman Street.

“That is such a dirty river,” a woman said to me at the hospital a few days ago, as I admired it from the sixth floor. “And yet people fish in it! I used to live on Sherman Street,” she added, perhaps confident that I had never been near there.

I felt a bit defensive at the time, and I felt that same feeling now, the fence pressing against my skin.

I love this river.

I know it’s dirty. I know about the abandoned shopping cart rusting against the bank on the far side that no one has bothered to recover.

But it is also the home to bouncing light and breeze and baby ducklings and I love it.

I thought of the neighborhood I had just rounded earlier in the day, my neighborhood, the neighborhood with the dirty reputation. (The beginning of July is a good time here because if you hear a bang, you can tell yourself, “It’s just fireworks!”)

At 3:45, I had circled through the alleys, looking for children.

“Ice cream in 15 minutes!” I yelled. “Not now, not till 4 o’clock.”

This may be the single most fun thing to do on a sleepy, humid summer day. At one house, before anyone opened the door, I heard shouts of “Ice cream!” from behind the curtains.

“Can I bring a friend?” Another boy asked. Of course, by the time I was back at my house, he and his friend were coasting in on their bikes.

“Fifteen minutes,” I insisted. “Bike around the block a few times.”

I went to my kitchen and popped open the cardboard flaps of four boxes of ice cream and slid them side by side into my cooler, that perfectly fits four boxes.

We were in the first rounds of stickiness when we heard the blows and the yelling. We couldn’t see, because the men were behind a building, under the tree.

I had passed the tree on my 3:45 walk, and hurried on, seeing two white people in a car, one striking the dash board. The tree is an eerie hidden gathering place, the silent witness to stab wounds and empty beer cans.

Now, the kids and I paused and looked that direction and I began to think that even with a building between us we were a little close.

Crash! Bang! Bang! Bang!

“I hope that’s fireworks,” one of the boys said, and that’s when I went for my phone.

But when I returned to the porch, the boys said, “He’s gone,” so I didn’t dial 911.  I looked at their young faces, unable to determine if they knew more than they were saying.

Strawberry syrup dripped from the bottle, pooling dark red on the porch boards. 

The children laughed and ate ice cream, and I made a mental note to get more cookies and cream next time.

I know it’s dirty here. But this is my home and I love it.

And even in my kitchen sink, there’s a contrast of clean and dirty swirling in my cooler as I clean it after the ice cream is all consumed. Just as the fight beneath the tree coexisted with our ice cream party, and the ducklings bob around the slimy shopping cart, the dish soap battles with the sticky remnants of chocolate. 

After the ice cream was washed from the porch, I walked to an appointment, and passed a crowd of children, some of them faces from my ice cream party, gathering around a black woman and child.

“Then just throw that waste in the trash!” She screamed. 

I couldn’t see well, but it seemed the woman’s hand may have hit the side of the child’s face.

There was a bike upside down, as if someone had been fixing it. She raised her foot and the bike went flying. “Just throw that wretch away if you’re going to act like this!”

I thought of presenting her words unedited. I didn’t, but I wonder, how it would be to have grown up like this to hear on a regular basis, language that is considered dirty? To see adults acting like this?

And then, the words, that took away my desire to be profitable. Another story of dirtiness, in the disguise of clean-ness. Darkness, presenting as light, more sickening than the blows and the banging. 

I cut through the back alley behind my house, my ancient flip flops crunching the gray pebbles, out to Jefferson Street, past porches of people enjoying the evening. Two small boys windmilled the dirt at the edge of the street, blowing a cloud across my path.

“It’s a dust storm!” I said to them with a smile, but my heart was heavy.

So I stopped on the bridge and looked at the dirty river, that I love so much, and the boat and its wake. 

It is quite easy to be either coldly uncompromising against sin or warmly tolerant of it. But what is difficult-and in fact impossible without the work of the Holy Spirit- is to show both God’s holiness and love at the same time.

–Dick Keyes, Chameleon Christianity 

Night was falling when I walked home, refreshed and lightened, having shared laughter and good conversation with my friends, standing in their kitchen.

Again I was in the middle of the Sherman Street bridge when fat drops of rain started to fall through the orbs of street lights, as if someone were flicking a giant hose over the warm cement.

I walked home, under the shadow of my own umbrella, barely noticing when the fat drops stopped.

And just as surely as the shadow reminds me there is a street light, so must the darkness around us be defined because there is light above us. 

Oh, the brokenness of the world! my heart cries tonight. And oh how much more it hurts when you love!

But this, my friends, is why Jesus died.  Much of the world was in rebellion against Him, but He loved anyway.  And this is why he calls us to be like Him.

And perhaps this is our best chance at being like Him: loving no matter what. Loving, anyway.