BECAUSE OF GOD

Everything is going to be alright.

By Brian Broome
 

Every Sunday, like many Black boys way back when, I was stuffed into a suit, a comb was run through my hair, and I was dragged off to church very much against my will.

It never took. My questions about it were far too numerous, and the inconsistencies within it became too much of a strain when I got old enough to recognize how suffering was doled out by said God. It always seemed to me that some people, by their mere existence, were receiving far more than their fair share. I realized that injustice and cruelty were much more prevalent in the world than were kindness and charity, and by the time I got around to asking myself what kind of loving God would approve all this suffering for only certain people, I was done. I never darkened the door of that church again.

But my mother soldiered on. Service every Sunday and Bible study on Wednesdays. My mother is a devout Christian. I mean a real one. She believes in feeding the hungry, housing the unhoused and caring for the sick. She was my very first example of faith before I got out into the world and saw with my own eyes how religion seemed to have morphed into a weapon of greed and power. My mother’s faith is strong. It comforts her. And now I wish I had some of it.

When I called her a couple of days after the election from my newly turned red state, she answered the phone in her red state as fresh as a daisy. Didn’t seem stressed at all, even though she, like myself, was hoping for a different outcome. When she heard the exhaustion in my voice, she asked me what was wrong, and I told her about my fears. I told her about my anger. I told her about the woman standing in front of me at the drugstore who bumped fists with the cashier celebrating their victory over me and those like me — and about the hatred toward them I felt bloom in my heart that hadn’t been there before. I told her how there was no justice in the world.

And, before I could go on any longer, she stopped me and told me that all was in God’s hands and that He would make things right.

It has always annoyed me when she says things like this. It feels like a platitude. A nonanswer. A nonsolution. And, for the first time, in my distress, I told her that. And she wasted no time dressing me down.

My mother is a septuagenarian Black woman who grew up in rural Georgia and then moved to Ohio. She has lived in red states (or purple states that turned red) before we even called them their colors. She remembers Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and Richard M. Nixon. She has been screamed at in the face by their minions, who didn’t hide behind anonymity on the internet. She has seen it all, and she believes she survived it all because of God and that everything is going to be all right. There is, she says, nothing new under the sun.

My mother comes from a generation of Black Americans who have seen justice snatched away more times than you’ve had hot dinners. She has heard politicians shout the n-word into microphones in the middle of the town square. And, through it all, Jesus was her rock. I envy her that sense of security now. That ability to get on with things, certain that they will get better. She knows, firsthand, that strife in this life is unavoidable.

But even though we’re tired, she said, it’s not okay to sit back and do nothing. Embrace your second wind when it comes (and it will come).
 

This essay is from the Washington Post. 
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