Disciples of Christ

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 Once when I was a little boy, I saw news footage in which grown men and women screamed and ranted at a little girl outside a school in Mississippi. When the newsman said that she was 12, two years older than me at the time, something inside me broke. In my sheltered world, so-called colored children and white children had always gone to the same schools, and grown-ups didn't threaten kids. "Why are they yelling at her like that?" I asked my mother in tears. "She's only a little girl." My mother made the sighing noise adults make when children learn things no one should have to learn. "Because they're ignorant," she said finally, my family's catch-all phrase for explaining things that will never make sense. It wasn't enough of an explanation, and that was a first lesson, too. I didn’t understand. I had gone with my mom to Selma to a “march” when I was eight, but I didn’t understand the significance of that either at the time.

But the lesson that I learned from the Ruby Bridges event was that doing good and right things cannot protect you from being hurt. There is real danger in naming what is wrong in the world and trying to change it.

Well, it just might be that some of us who try to follow Christ have been following too safe a course, sitting in mighty comfortable seats at the banquet, so much so that we need this awful story to help us ask if we are following the One whose way was full of danger and whose final destination was a cross.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pastor Skip French

1500 Forest Hills Blvd (Hwy 279)              479 . 855 . 2780         Bella Vista, Arkansas 72715

Monday Musings are e-mailed weekly to the congregation's email group.

The weekly Monday Musings are published in Bella Vista weekly newspaper.

Peace & Blessings,

Skip

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