Living Outwardly
I took swimming lessons sitting in a pew. They taught me how to stay afloat when the air closed in around me. And when they thought they’d taught me enough, they dunked me in water and hurled me out into space.
Well on July 6th, 2016, my world turned upside down. Well, perhaps, more accurately, it had always been upside down, and it was only then that I had noticed. It was around six pm when I heard the news, and the horizon was shining with a pastel gradient of fuschia to cantaloupe. I was listening to the radio out on the deck, I remember, watching the old albino squirrel hop along the top of my fence toward the pine trees in back, while Frank Sinatra’s voice singing “Fly Me to the Moon” floated out of the pantry window like a helium balloon.
And then the music switched off like a light, and the world went silent. I was confused for a second, as to why anyone would turn off the radio in the middle of a perfectly good piece of Sinatra, when my dad appeared out on the deck in front of me. The back door closed behind him with a resonant clang, a single, accented note that hung in the air like a chord from a funeral requiem. He stood before me, a stone-faced prophet, and when he spoke, his words fell to the earth engraved on a tombstone.
“A policeman just shot and killed a guy on the corner of Snelling and Larpenteur...it was a routine traffic stop...it’s too soon to know for sure, but they’re saying the policeman shot prematurely ...they’re saying the man was...completely innocent....” He kept speaking, but I tuned out. My brain had run out of storage and froze up; I could feel the battery getting hot. I heard the squirrel topple off the fence in back with a squeal. Only the name hung in my head: Philando Castile.
For the next several days, I didn’t swim through life like I always had. It was more like I was drowning, like someone had poked a hole in my buoyant, happy little world and an ocean of pain had come gushing in all at once. At first, the salt-water had just stung in my eyes, but soon I was sinking. For once in my life, I felt the conscious strain of trying to keep afloat when every pore of my tear-soaked body was filling me up and weighing me down with pain.
I didn’t want to see anyone. I holed up in my office, staring at my laptop, trying to form words that conveyed how I felt, but no words came. And then all of a sudden, two days had passed. It was Friday night. Youth group. Begrudgingly, I drove to church.
“It’s been a tough week...a man was shot and killed less than a mile away from this very church,” began the pastor, “so tonight, our only response can be to praise God for how good he is!” Immediately, I wanted to punch a window. I wanted to leave that stupid building and all its oblivious, happy people forever and ever. It was like someone had tried to colorize my black and gray photograph of the world, but they’d done it in a dozen shades of neon pink, leaving it looking fake and contrived. When I headed home after church, the words finally came. All my emotions came flooding out straight into the keyboard. I wrote a depressing, angsty poem that I’ll never read again and posted it on social media around midnight. Then I went to bed. Sunday came, and I went to church again. I was reminded that the next week I would spend entirely on a youth missions trip to my very own twin cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Half of me was really excited to pull my mind out of the stagnant bog it had been sitting in, but the other half was obstinate: “They’ll try to make you believe a lie,” it seemed to warn me. “They’ll try to get you to believe that the world is good.” Regardless, I went.
We visited a Liberian church on the first day, and every single person in the church was black. I expected them to be mourning or afraid, but instead they were laughing and joking, full of joy. A girl named Janelle stood up and sang a beautiful song about “God’s mercy raining down” or something. It was unnerving, all the joy in that building, but in a good way, I think, like taking a bite out of a lemon and finding it as sweet as honey.
Later on in the week, we volunteered at a little place in downtown Minneapolis that served as temporary housing for people who had nowhere to live. We babysat the children for a few hours, and to be quite frank, it was the most fun I’d had in quite a while. Two kids walked up to me grinning and led me straight outside. What I saw was quite remarkable. Here in the middle of the bustling downtown was a large green field with play equipment and see-saws fenced in from the rest of the world. It was like a little haven, an escape from all the pain in these children’s lives. After playing catch got boring, we headed back inside to play with Lego’s. I built a spaceship to carry people to the moon. The boy on my left started building a little house. In front of it, he built a small wall. “Why did you cover up the entrance to the house?” I asked him. He turned to me, still grinning. “Because the people got evicted.”
I could talk and talk about all the wonderful things that happened to me on that trip, but the best lessons I learned, I learned on the final day, when we went and organized donations for a food shelf at a church in Minneapolis. The organizer was a big man with a deep, booming laugh who favored his right foot. “I used to be a bodyguard for Beyonce,” he said. “One day, I got shot at. Six bullets in my leg. They rushed me to the hospital and said I’d never walk again.” Here he laughed long and hard. “Well, I sure showed them didn’t I?”
When the people showed up around seven pm to pick up food, my friend Sam and I helped carry out produce to the car of a man named Brian. He looked about sixty, and he leaned heavily on a black walker. After hauling food to the back of his Buick, we started talking with him. “There’s so much shooting lately,” he said with concern. “Oh, it’s horrible. Just last week a little girl got shot a few streets down.” I nodded and listened. I saw the pain in his old, tarnished eyes. And it was then that he said something that I’ll never forget as long as I live. “You know, the Lord is good, though. Can I tell you two something?” He leaned in real close, like he was telling us the secret of immortality, and then he pointed down at his walker, a look of pure joy in his eyes. “I found this walker in the dumpster this morning. The Lord knew I needed it, and he provided. Isn’t that amazing?” He was beaming, and his eyes glistened with tears of joy, like twin lighthouses, keeping ships afloat in the darkest of storms. “So don’t you two boys forget; even in the darkest of situations, remember: God is good.”
His words tumbled around in my head for months afterward. ‘How do you get to the point where you’re joyful no matter what?’ I thought. You have to live inside out, I think. Others first. Yourself second. You can get by being ignorant, living in your own happy, little world, but true joy only comes from living outwardly. That lesson and that lesson alone has helped me stay afloat.
After everyone left the food shelf, the organizer with the big booming laugh went through the line last of all. Apparently, he depended on the food shelf donations as much as any of the people he had been helping. He picked up a big red velvet cake and smiled. “For my grandson’s birthday!” And then he winked at me.