A replacement theory: Love for hate

Ruth Whitfield was headed home after visiting her husband of 68 years at a nursing home. Can you imagine what the two of them talked about that day – so many memories!

On the way back, the 86-year-old woman stopped at a grocery store in her Buffalo neighborhood.

Andre Mackneil was there, too, picking up a cake for his son’s third birthday celebration. What a wonderful day for that family, right?

Katherine Massey, a 72-year-old former writer for the Buffalo News, also was getting groceries. Nearby was Pearl Young, 77, who ran a food pantry in the predominantly Black neighborhood for 25 years.

Pearl embodied the gospel message of feeding the hungry and caring for the poor. She was Jesus incarnate.

She was about to be gunned down.

In another aisle was great-grandmother and cancer survivor Celestine Chaney, 65, shopping with her 74-year-old sister. Also in the store: 62-year-old Geraldine Talley, 32-year-old Roberta Drury, and 52-year-old Margus Morrison.

Watching over them was Aaron Salter, 55, a retired Buffalo police officer working as a security guard.

Making trips between store and the parking lot was church deacon Heyward Patterson, 67, who helped people board a shuttle for those without transportation. Earlier, he fed people at a soup kitchen.

Wonderful, beautiful, inspiring people. People of deep faith. People of great love. People of such decency and goodness and kindness. People who made an impact on many lives and their community.

The kind of people our faith celebrates. The kind of people who remind us what we can be. The kind of role models we should tell our children to emulate.

In minutes, all were shot dead by Payton Gendron, an 18-year-old white man who perceived all of them as a threat because of the color of their skin.

He, too, was a victim of the poison offered so readily and convincingly by so many in our society – people in politics, media, and culture-war religion. Another life ruined by the flames of hate devouring our society.

Just the latest.

In every generation, opportunists fan the flames of hate until they’re white-hot. When hate is acted out, we focus on the weapons involved, and rightly so; America is uniquely defined by guns and the carnage they produce daily.

But our attention can’t stop there. It needs to go deeper. It must start with identifying and challenging the hate that sows fear and impregnates violence throughout our communities.

Choosing love over hate

We must push back against the hate that tells people to fear anyone who is different. The hate that urges people to arm themselves because “those people” are dangerous – those Black people, those Jewish people, those Muslim people, those gay people, those trans people, those Asian people, those Mexican people, those immigrant people, those doctors and teachers and scientists, and on and on.

Hate that says “those people” are out to get you, replace you, destroy your way of life. You must protect yourself. Stop them. Keep them away. Get them before they get you.

Hate that also says: Don’t get to know any of those people we’ve labeled a threat. Don’t listen to the stories of a long-married couple or a man picking up a child’s birthday cake – you know, people just like you.

Don’t hear their stories because you might realize you’re being told lies about them. Don’t let your children learn about any of this because they might start seeing through the lies, too.

Keep the lies and the lines in place. Feed the fear. Fan the hate.

At church last Sunday, we shared the stories of those gunned down in Buffalo. We mustn’t forget their stories, nor the hate that told so many lies about them.

But remembering them isn’t enough.

Our society is awash in people peddling hate for personal gain. They pollute our politics, our airwaves, our social media, and yes, even many pulpits with their us-against-them poison that produces these atrocities.

Stopping the poison

We mustn’t ignore the hate being circulated. We can’t be silent about the evil being promulgated. Nor can our response be limited to words alone.

We need to lovingly and persistently call out those who inject this poison into our world. Turn them off. Vote them out. Hold them responsible when their inciteful words have the intended effect.

Our faith calls on us to not only reject the ideology of hate but to work collaboratively to protect all God’s children and build communities where all are treated equally as God’s beloved.

Places where the divine image is seen in all, not only a select few. Where loving lives are celebrated, not desecrated. Where the peddlers of poison are turned off and turned away.

Where hope-filled, faith-filled and love-filled people — like those at the supermarket — partner with God and put their lives into in the redemptive work of replacing hate with love.

(Information about the shooting victims comes from The Associated Press and media outlets in Buffalo.)

More than dried ink on a page

(Photo courtesy of Jemasmith@CreativeCommons.org)

A dust-up over the Catholic priest who didn’t precisely recite the words for baptism underscores the two different approaches to religion.

In case you haven’t heard, a well-intentioned pastor in Phoenix said “we baptize you” – recognizing he represents Jesus and the entire faith community – instead of the assigned “I baptize you” in the church’s rulebook. A furor followed.

The beloved pastor resigned. The diocese suggested thousands of baptisms performed by the priest were invalid, meaning other sacraments that followed – including marriage and ordination – could be invalid as well.

Because, well, the rules, you know.

It must be pointed out that the Catholic church’s practice of baptism has changed significantly over the centuries. Are those baptisms invalid as well because they deviated from today’s proscribed formula?

And if we say those baptisms were valid even though they differed, why the kerfuffle? Is it about the words, or something else?

Which brings us to the foundational question: Is faith about parroting words, or something more?  Are sacraments about dried ink on a page, or are they about the Spirit living in the hearts of people?

Dried ink on a page

In one view, God dictates – Scripture, doctrines, rulebooks, what have you – and we’re the recording secretaries who write things down, memorize them, and repeat them accurately.

Memorize, recite, repeat.

In this approach, our rituals must be tightly regulated and closely policed, with major penalties for even a small deviation. If we misread one word or substitute one pronoun, we lose points and pastors.

It also bears repeating that Jesus frequently got in trouble for going off-script. Eating with the wrong people. Yes, saying the wrong things. Loving in the wrong ways. Baptism is an invitation into this off-script way of living.

His teachings remind us that faith isn’t about duplicating rituals or parroting words.

Faith is about trying to live in the Spirit of the words – words of love, compassion, healing, inclusion, peacemaking, forgiveness, reconciliation, helping the needy, welcoming the stranger, renouncing power and wealth and self-interest.

Basically, faith is about living in the love from which and for which we were made. It’s about moving beyond the fears and the insecurities and self-interest that separate us from one another and from God.

It’s not about reciting correct words; it’s about living in the Spirit that is the inkwell for those words.

An off-script faith

It’s about sharing meals with those who are hungry, giving a word of encouragement to someone who is struggling, sharing our authentic self with others so they, too, can be their authentic self with us.

It’s about seeing the many injustices around us and putting ourselves into the struggle to right these wrongs.

It’s about seeking and questioning and being open to different perspectives and new experiences of God in every place, in every circumstance, in every life.

It’s about becoming more gracious, more compassionate, more accepting. Becoming a little more in love with God and life, with one another, and with all God’s creation.

A living faith always begins with a “we” instead of an “I” or a “me”. Faith isn’t a solo endeavor. We grow collectively – that’s aim of any Spirit-filled community. Two or more, as the saying goes. An “us” and a “we”.

Together, we create space for people to be their authentic self, share their stories, hold one other in their joys and their struggles, and experience the God of love together. Then we go into the wider world embodying this transformative way of living.

Every moment becomes baptism, bringing us more deeply into the Spirit that washes over us without exception, without word, without end.

When religion leaves faith behind

(Photo by Pete Bannan)

Many people today categorize themselves as spiritual but not religious. What I hear them saying is they believe in God and spirituality, but many forms of religion these days take them the opposite way.

Many practices of religion get in the way of living in a truly loving, spiritual way, and people feel forced to choose between faith and religion. It’s good to remind ourselves that the two are not the same.

Let’s define faith as the Spirit in which we’re made to live; the love from which and for which we are created; the values embedded in the foundation of our spirituality.

Faith centers us in the truth that we love God by loving all our neighbors as ourselves, caring for those who are struggling, seeing the image of the creator equally in every person, following the call to work for justice.

Religion is how we put that Spirit and those values into practice. It’s supposed to be the expression and implementation of those values in our individual and collective lives; sadly, it often is not.

As we know, religion easily gets detached from the faith in which it’s meant to be grounded. It rejects the Spirit and values it’s supposed to embody, choosing to go a different way.

Making religion align with faith

We don’t need to look hard for examples: culture wars, holy wars, crusades, inquisitions, burnings at the stake, Nazi extermination camps, white churchgoers firebombing Black churches, KKK crosses lit in Jesus’ name, Capitol rioters carrying Bibles and rosaries.

Religion gets reduced to theological propositions about who’s in and who’s out, who deserves unconditional love, who should be attacked. Religion is turned into a wall, a weapon, a rejection of not only God’s children but the God who created them in the multiplicity of the divine image and likeness.

Prophets of all ages and all religions call people back to the foundation of their faith when religious expression becomes unmoored and needs to repent and change.

Jesus embodied this prophetic tradition. He called out those who turned religion into rejection. He felt a harsh backlash from those intent upon defending their religion at the expense of their faith.

He reminded the religiously observant that faith isn’t about following rules and laws and theologies; instead, love and love alone fulfills all that God seeks from us.

That is our faith. That also should be our religion.

We’re imperfect people, so our faith and our religion will always be an imperfect match. That’s a given. But we’re called to be vigilant in seeing how we can make our religion align more closely with our faith.

New ways of being faithful

Our prophetic role is to challenge religious expressions – including our own – that pull us away from faith toward something else: power, control, self-importance, domination, ego, judgement, privilege, bullying, ostracizing, self-aggrandizing, rejection, and fighting.

The letter attributed to James reminds us that if our religion doesn’t put our faith into practice, it’s thoroughly lifeless. Or, to paraphrase Paul, religion that’s lacking in love amounts to nothing more than noise. It leads nowhere.

Any religion separated from faith is going to wither and die – and it should. We see this happening in so many expressions of religion today. It’s a necessary step. These forms of religious expression are withering away so something more faithful can be reborn in their place – the cycle of death and resurrection.

There’s the marvelous line in the gospel of Luke about leaving the spiritually dead to bury their dead. We’re at that moment. Leave those deadened by these forms of religion to bury them.

Instead, let faith inspire yet another time of reforming in ways both old and new — new ways for this old faith to thrive, new places to offer healing and discovery and growth, new gatherings where we can be comforted and challenged and transformed.

New ways of being faithful.

The sacred invitation to dive in

My family rented a cottage near a lake each summer when I was a boy. After lunch each day, we’d walk down a road to the lake, peel off our shirts, kick off our flipflops and head for our assigned dock, ready to dive in.

The cold water jolted you the first time you went in. Usually, I needed time – and encouragement from those already in the water – to dive in.

Once wet, I didn’t want to get out.

That dock is a good metaphor for faith.

The Scriptures, traditions and liturgies of our various faiths are a platform to dive into the mystery, the presence, and the deep love of God. The platform always points us beyond itself.

Our faith isn’t about the dock, but where the dock wants to take us. Unfortunately, we can get so attached to the dock that we never dive from it. We never get wet.

Where the dock leads us

Instead, we stand on dock and speculate about the water below. We develop theological terms for the water and argue over which ones are most accurate.

Worse, we fall into the trap of fighting over who’s allowed on the dock and which diving forms are acceptable. Self-appointed guardians try to control access to the dock and reject anyone who doesn’t meet their criteria.

This is one main reason many people are turned off by organized religion – lots of standing around and arguing on the dock, not much actual swimming.

If you’re never going to get wet, what’s the point?

Jesus experienced the same thing. The self-appointed dock guardians of his time tried to keep certain people away – Samaritans, women, children, Gentiles, lepers, tax collectors, anyone who was different from them.

He ignored them, immersed himself in the water and invited others to join. If they were barred from the dock, he told them to wade in from the shore.

People recognized that unlike those who never left the dock, Jesus spoke with authority about the water. He was dripping wet! He swam the depths, experienced the currents, enjoyed the water’s delights.

He shared his experience of the water in such a way that others wanted to dive in, too. He spoke of living water available to everyone. Unlike the bone-dry people who never left the dock, he knew the water.

Everyone into the water

And he told us what it means to dive in.

See someone hungry? Dive into the moment and feed them.

Someone hurting? Dive into the situation and do something to help them heal.

See the injustice of someone being barred from the dock? Offer them a full and unencumbered path into the water.

See someone afraid of the water? Reach out a hand and offer to help them slowly wade in.

Swimming in this water means looking at ourselves, at others and the world through God’s eyes. We plunge into this water, and everything changes.

It doesn’t matter how we get into the water, only that we get wet. Once there, we let the living water comfort us, hold us, refresh us, and wrap us in its love.

And invite everyone else to swim with us, too.

Ready for change?

Whenever we make a major choice – an election, for instance – we create a possibility for change. Such a time is at hand. A long-awaited day has arrived in our deeply divided society.

We can keep going down the same dead-end path, or we can turn around and begin anew.

A lot of people are ready to chart a new course.

By every measure, our society is a mess. And, let’s admit it, so are we. We’re anxious and stressed and exhausted by years of chaos and conflict and bullying and divisiveness and lying and incivility from leaders in all parts our society, including religion.

We’ve inhaled a lot of toxic stuff, making it difficult to breath. We’re ready for fresh air. We’re yearning to heal and mend and move forward.

None of this is new. It’s a tale as old as time.

We humans have a history of falling and getting up. We wander away from what matters – love – and get completely lost. The question is how long we wander before we realize we’re lost and begin to find a way back.

Our Scriptures are full of such stories, tales of people and societies that were lost and then found. Our faith tradition is full of second chances, falling and rising, sin and redemption, death and resurrection, and division and reconciliation.

How do we get back on track? How do we mend and heal? Our faith provides a template.

The journey back begins with recognizing how far we’ve wandered off course. Prophets come along in many forms and challenge us to take an objective, unflinching look at ourselves.

They urge us to see what a mess we’ve become. See what needs to change. Compare what we’ve become to what we’re meant to be.

Then, we repent – a word that simply means aiming to do better. We commit to personal change as well as collective transformation. We re-center ourselves in love and renew our work to redeem and heal the world.

The mending process requires commitment and effort. Healing doesn’t just happen. Division doesn’t magically disappear. The fever won’t break until we address the underlying causes and eradicate the illness.

It’s holy and sacred work. It’s the work that’s given to us to do.

No, not everyone will be on board. Many will insist things are great and we need to keep heading in the same direction. They’ll continue stoking fear and hatred and endless wars over culture, politics and religion.

No matter.

We don’t need to get everyone on board; all we need is enough people committed to making a difference. That’s how it always works.

Each of us is a strong stitch than can pull things back together. Stitch by stitch, we repair what others have torn apart. We make all things new again.

That is the story of our faith. That is the way of human history. People come along to repair what others have ripped apart, including the parts of themselves that have gotten torn.

Tomorrow: Looking at ourselves

(“Praying Hands” image courtesy of josephleenovak @creativecommons.org)

We need one another

What do you miss during social distancing?

I miss hugs. Concerts. Attending church. Sharing a birthday cake. Being there in person to feel someone’s joy or pain or struggle.

I miss Singo, a sing-along version of bingo. During Singo, nobody cares about political labels, age groups or religious affiliation. Everyone sings familiar lyrics together, and strangers get up and dance with one another.

Everyone just enjoys each other’s company.

All those activities are on hold as we try to contain the spread of a virus that leaves death and battered bodies in its wake. When the time comes that we can safely be social again, I hope we’ll do it with a renewed appreciation for each other.

I hope the pandemic has taught us how much we need one another.

We needed that lesson. We’ve become so divided that we’ve forgotten we’re intimately bound to one another.

As the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, we’re all “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” Mother Teresa said that “if we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten we belong to each other.”

How did we forget that? How did we lose the pleasure and peace of each other’s loving company?

Perhaps a confluence of factors is responsible for fraying our common fabric.

Our culture worships individuality, the myth of the self-made man who pulls himself up by his bootstraps without anyone’s assistance at all. It’s all about me and my rights.

The Americanized version of Christianity promotes this self-centeredness, too. The prosperity gospel preaches self-absorption. Pad your personal accounts – financial as well as spiritual – while telling those bleeding by the side of the road to work harder.

We’ve got political, social and religious leaders trying to sell us the bitter pill of division as well. They want us to quarantine within political, social and theological bubbles, pushing away everyone who is different.

They frame it as us-against-them and promote nonstop political, cultural and religious wars against anyone not inside our bubble.

No! They’re selling a lie. The last three months have reminded us how much we need to stop the fighting and start reconnecting with one another.

Those connections are what we miss.

God made us as social beings. We’re hard-wired to be together and have relationship with God, with all God’s children, and with all God’s creation. Those artificial divisions deprive us of what we need most.

Hopefully that’s the pandemic’s lesson for when the time comes that we can safely come together again as extended human family.

We need one another.

(photo by Lisa Fotios @pexels.com)

 

 

 

Who’s atop our pedestals?

We drove through a small town on our way to a nature area for a picnic and a hike in southern Ohio. The town is quaint with old storefronts dotting the public square.

In the middle of the square is a cannon, part of a large war monument that lists the names of town members who died in various wars. It’s a nice gesture to remember their sacrifices.

What struck me, though, was how there were no other remembrances of anything else involved with the town. How odd, I thought.

There was no mention of the town’s founder. Nothing honoring the teacher who started the first school that taught children about their world. No tribute to the town’s first doctor who made house calls in the middle of the night.

Nothing honoring the wise and compassionate leaders who developed the town and got it through times of division, showing everyone that there are ways to settle differences other than conflict.

I’m not picking on this one town. Most places – large and small – are the same way, if you think about it. There are war memorials and monuments to warriors in rural and urban communities.

Sporting events have morphed into tributes to the military, with fans applauding those who serve.

Meanwhile, we give comparatively scant attention to those who teach us, heal us, help us to grow in wisdom. We don’t invite doctors and nurses to stand on dugouts between innings for applause. We don’t invite teachers and social workers to stand at midfield for tributes.

We don’t hold ticker-tape parades for scientists and researchers who develop treatments that save our lives and our environment. We don’t create memorials to those who feed the poor and help the needy and work for peace.

No, our pedestals are mostly reserved for those who conduct war. So is our national budget; our society spends as much on the military as the next seven countries combined.

There’s nothing wrong with remembering the sacrifices of military people. When theirs are the only sacrifices we honor, however, we’re doing something other than showing appreciation to them.

We’re glorifying conflict and worshiping war.

My dad was a paratrooper in the Korean war. He was wounded and returned with his emotional scars. Neither he nor any of the other veterans in my family circle spoke of the atrocities they saw.

None of them glorified war.

Noble and courageous acts occur during war, but war itself is the ultimate human failure – God’s children killing God’s children — and must never be portrayed as anything else, certainly not with pedestals.

During our response to the pandemic, we’ve started paying more attention to people who have been overlooked by comparison.

We’re seeing the brave medical workers sacrificing to save lives and how we have failed to give them the support they need. We’re appreciating teachers much more after two months of home schooling.

We’re seeing how ordinary people treating others with compassion and care. We see regular folks doing courageous and noble acts to keep others safe.

We see so many people who belong on pedestals. We need to think about which ones we choose to put there, and why.

(Photo courtesy of Szilas @commons.wikimedia.org)

Healing a broken system

Americans read about foreign hospitals overwhelmed by the coronavirus and mistakenly thought those horror stories could never happen here because our health care system is so good.

We spend more per capita on health care than any other developed nation, which provided a sense of security that was badly misplaced.

The virus has exposed a broken system. Our faith compels us to try to heal it.

The heart of religion is about healing our individual and collective brokenness and repairing ruptured relationships with God and one another. We must be healed, and we also must be healers, both individually and collectively.

The accounts of Jesus’ life describe him as a gifted healer who offered healing to everyone free of charge. He could have leveraged his abilities, but he chose not to.

He never monetized healing. Instead, he offered it like grace to anyone who desired it. He sent his followers to heal collectively in the same unbrokered way.

We’re meant to do so as well. As N.T. Wright puts it, “Healing is far too important and central to the stories about Jesus for those who wish to follow him today to ignore it.”

We can’t pretend about our health care system anymore. Long before the pandemic, we knew it was broken.

Millions can’t afford it. Those with health coverage face crippling debt for something as common as cancer. Premiums and deductibles soar. The cost of drugs jumps exponentially.

We saw with the opioid epidemic how a profit-motivated system inflicts suffering and death on society by pushing drugs that enrich the bottom line.

The coronavirus stripped away any remaining illusions about our system.

A doctor in a New York City emergency room wrote last month about her experiences as the virus raged. Dr. Helen Ouyang described for The New York Times Magazine how the system was ill-prepared for a pandemic that the medical profession had long predicted.

She described patients crammed into the ER, lying in their own waste while dying unattended because of depleted medical staffs.

Doctors and nurses were among the sick and dying because of inadequate protective equipment, a situation Dr. Ouyang described as far worse than in any of the “third-world” countries she visited on relief missions.

Applauding health care workers every evening or posting grateful memes isn’t enough. We have the resources we need to fix the system. What’s missing is our resolve.

Profit will always be part of the system, but we can’t allow it to be the engine driving it. Providing healing at an affordable cost for all God’s children must be the overriding intent.

There are many ways to do this. We need wide-ranging discussions to plot the best path and then enact changes, knowing we’ll get pushback from those making enormous profits off the current, broken system.

When healing is turned into a high-priced commodity available only to those who can afford it, we get a sick society. What we need now is healing. And people committed to being healers.

(Photo courtesy of atomicity @creativecommons.org)

Tomorrow: Monuments to war

 

 

 

 

Faith in our broken society

The pandemic has shown us that we need to change not only our individual lives but our collective ones as well. There’s a lot in our society that’s deeply broken and needs fixed.

Our spending priorities are askew. Our health system is a mess. Our leadership is lacking. Our decisions favor some lives and render others expendable.

In times like these, prophetic voices challenge systems and shape discussions. We need to be those voices.

We can’t hide inside places of worship. We must get involved in what’s happening outside our doors.

Faith and values apply not only to our personal lives, but to our collective lives as well. If they don’t, our faith is only half-hearted and our values null and void.

Our religious tradition urges us to love God with all our hearts in all areas of our lives, not just the convenient parts. We’re to love our neighbors – all of them, in all situations – the same way we love ourselves.

Real faith is an all-or-nothing proposition.

Throughout history, many religiously observant people have endorsed superficial faith. Some Christians peddle the notion that Jesus’ values — love, compassion, forgiveness, healing, inclusion, caring for the needy, promoting peace — should apply to personal lives but can be excluded from our collective choices.

They say our society should be run by conflicting values – wealth, greed, privilege, self-interest, domination.

The same mentality created slavery and Jim Crow. White Christians insisted that their oppressive systems were exempt from Jesus’ commands to treat everyone as an equally beloved child of God.

We can’t limit faith to a few areas of our lives. We can’t ignore what’s being done by the various social systems that need our support or our inattention to continue.

That’s the real test of faith.

As the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, “A religion true to its nature must also be concerned about man’s social conditions. … Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion.”

One form of religion mustn’t gain privilege or supremacy; rather, faith compels us to ground our collective decisions in the loving values that are the foundation of all true religion.

Our conversations about the many challenges confronting us must begin by acknowledging our shared responsibility to care for all God’s children and all God’s creation in all circumstances.

It’s all-or-nothing.

We’ll sometimes disagree about how best to accomplish goals, but we must always be in accord on the underlying intention for all we do. Love alone must be our motivation.

If we choose a different starting point for our collective decisions, then we’ve not only lost our way but any semblance of faith as well.

(Photo illustration courtesy of burrows.nichole28 @creativecommons.org)

Tomorrow: Healers in a broken system

 

 

Who needs a haircut?

While sheltering at home, folks have shared funny memes imaging how we’ll look when we’re able to get our hair cut and styled again.

Isn’t it telling that we’re so conditioned to think about our looks, even during a pandemic?

In many cultures, appearances receive overriding importance, especially for women. Images set the bar for what we’re supposed to look like if we want to be accepted.

Of course, those images that are enhanced and manipulated. Nobody actually looks that way in real life, not even the models and actors.

In 2006, I covered a baseball game at Great American Ball Park attended by Tom Hanks, Ron Howard and Dennis Miller. They were doing a ballpark tour for Hanks’ birthday. They agreed to chat with reporters.

The first thing that got my attention when we met was how without makeup, they looked liked everyone else. They had age spots and bald spots and wrinkles and unruly hair.

Just like me.

Perhaps our time away from hair stylists can remind us that we worry too much about our appearances and those of others. Consider it a home-schooling lesson in how we mistakenly associate looks with value.

We tend to look positively on people who wear expensive clothes, drive exotic cars, live in big houses, and have immaculate skin, teeth and hair. Appearances sway our judgments.

The same works in reverse. When we see someone who doesn’t meet those standards, we might think less of them. And of ourselves as well.

It’s subliminal and insidious, and it pulls us away from the truth about ourselves: we’re all beloved children of God, just as we are. We lose sight of that when we judge by any other standard.

I help an inner-city church with its summer program for children from families struggling to make ends meet. The church serves breakfast and lunch – for some of the kids, the best meals they’ll get that day – and has activities in-between.

Each day starts with the kids gathering in the church itself for a message from the pastor, who reminds them they are beautiful and loved, just as they are. And nothing can ever change that.

These kids hear a different message every time they watch television or see an ad online. They’re told in subtle ways that they don’t measure up because they don’t meet the standard in front of their eyes.

They need to be reminded many times every day that those advertising images aren’t real and the messages they hear are wrong. They need to be told again and again that love and value aren’t dependent upon fancy clothes or expensive makeup.

Clothes are only clothes. Wrinkles are only wrinkles. Hair is only hair. None of them has anything to do with our innate value.

Remember that the next time you look in the mirror and fixate on a wrinkle, a bald spot or an out-of-place curl. That person you see? Beautiful, just as you are.

And so is everyone else. No matter how they look. No matter how long and unruly their hair.

(photo courtesy of pexels.com)

Tomorrow: The lie of control