Surfing the web today, I looked at the Dayton Daily News. That is the main newspaper of Dayton, Ohio. A place where I lived and worked for 6 years. It was where my son was born, and where my wife and I bought our first house. We were both teachers in the city schools there. Most of our kids came from broken homes and broken lives.
On that website, you can find mugshots of those in the Montgomery County Jail (Dayton is in Mont. County). For some reason, and I truly regret this for reasons I'll explain later, I decided to click on this and see if I knew anyone in jail.
It turns out at least 3 of my former students are on that site. 1 for probation violations, 1 for robbery, and 1 for robbery and murder. I know I alone couldn't have changed their lives, but what if we as a society came together and said "enough is enough?" What if we as Christians went to these people (adults AND kids) and acted like Christians among them rather than putting them in housing projects where we can just "avoid that side of town?" What if we took Jesus' words seriously to reach out to ALL PEOPLE?
Does that mean we may be in danger? Of course it does! Does that mean we'll fail? Definitely! Does that mean people will hate us? Yes! Does that mean our feelings will get hurt? Yes they will, more than once! But, as Christians, why should we expect anything less? Why should we expect to live in our happy little world and ignore the suffering around us as long as it stays out of our lives?
So, why do I feel guilty for looking? The faces of these people (not just my students but all of the 700+ just in that jail alone) show years of pain and suffering. Yes, they did bad things. They may even deserve punishment. But, they also deserve mercy and love. They deserve to be shown the right way to go. My guilt comes from all of the above statements, but most of all because they are put out there for public view just the same way we would look at animals in the zoo. And, the last time I checked, people may be animals (in the biological sense), but we don't belong in a zoo.
Could I have done anything to prevent these 3 former students of mine from being where they are? Probably not. I'm not even blaming myself, but I'm wondering what we all could have done? And more importantly, what can we do in the future? It takes all of us. It's time to wake up and live the faith, not just wear it on our shoulders. It's time to take our faith and wear it like a glove as we dig into the real issues!!
No comments:
Post a Comment