A Love For Terrorists, Death Row Inmates, And Me

Posted by parkejladd on Mar 2, 2010 in Featured {Article}, Slider | 2 comments

I’ll Love You If

I’ll love you if you look like me, give me what I want, and promise to never refute me. I’ll love you if you never label me a bad person, never speak the truth of who I am, never prophesy based on my undisciplined mind. I’ll love you if you never tell me, “No.” I’ll love you if you’re pretty and passionate. I’ll love you if you’re rich, trendy, and easy going. I’ll love you if you’re proportionate, well aligned, and symmetrical. I’ll love you satisfactorily–acceptably in the eyes of surrounding onlookers. I’ll love you based on my conditions, exemptions, and priorities. I’ll love you if you love me in return. I’ll love you if you promise to make me feel good, support me, comfort me, talk gently to me, and wrap your arms around me. I’ll love you if you have a degree, a car, a family, and a getaway plan. I’ll love you for what I can get in return. I’ll love you because you’re my friend. I’ll love you as long as I just have to say it, give lip service to it, and not really honor it in my heart.

I can’t bear the storm. I can’t handle the waves crashing against my damaged sea wall. Hit me too hard and I’ll crumble into your force, be absorbed by your strength, be flooded by what you call the natural progression of grace. I can’t say yes to your love for fear of trembling too deeply, shaking free of my own grasp, breaking away from the comfort of my self-centered goodness and keeping of unnecessary traditions. Your love moves too much. Your love has too much force, too much gravity, too much unresolved, undefinable power. Your love treads over oceans and builds upon their shores. Your love overwhelms my self-made, flesh-constructed barricades; makes swamp land of my shallow, arid desert; and brings forth rain upon my sandy, shifting fields. Your love is too good without me, too perfect apart from my imperfect presence. If I give you all I have, your love remains the same; if I give you nothing, your love remains the same–nothing can affect your love, nothing can change your stance toward me. Your love which I cannot describe, define, or return, soothes my soul yet shakes the foundation of my heart.

Point And Stare At Nothing At All

I’ll love you as long as you don’t look like a terrorist. Preconceptions of hate and fear based on what I’ve been told by media personalities and 5-star politicians have, for too long, permeated and shaped my mind. For too long I failed to deeply examine the issues and truths and hastily made conversation by simply accepting what I was told to believe. Believe and repeat–and repeat after me–believe and repeat. The long, gray beard covering your face and the tightly wrapped, sun-colored turban hiding your coarse, dark hair disguises your heart and blinds me from seeing beyond my fear and self-righteous, judgmental misconceptions. I will judge you, fear you, define you, stare at you, make you feel uncomfortable, force you to leave, and I’ll not feel a bit of remorse for any of it. You cannot sit in here. You must take your food and go. Back to the street, to the cold, to the night, to a small sub-culture of a world that actually loves and accepts you because they know and trust you. I will not know you. I will not trust you. I will not love you, and I will force you away from here. I will restrict my love and make you an exception to what I say is true on Sunday morning, sitting, drinking tea with my friends. You’ve never harmed a soul, yet something in me whispers, “Be careful.” Be careful to remember what you’ve been told to believe about them, what you’ve watched on your flat, glass encased box–the images still fresh, playing on repeat as shadows dance and explode and destroy other shadows right in front of your eyes. “They’re all the same, and they’re out to get us,” the suits say from behind the comfort of their steel desks and microphones. Hate what you don’t understand and withhold your love from those who look like terrorists. Withhold your love from those who bring terror, from those who wield their power with gun and cannon, from those who kill Americans, from those who kill good men and women. Go ahead and stare, let your children point their fingers. They will never turn. They will never turn–Saul of Tarsus–from their laws to grace–Paul of all people.

Floored

Your love starts as a shake and grows into a shocking reverberation that pulses through my soul, cuts the blood from my legs, pushes me to the floor, and leaves me gasping–mouth open wide–for air now full of dirt and hair kicked up from my reeling and tossing about. The carpet burns my face as it slides across. The lack of oxygen scorches my eyes till the blood vessels break, and I seem a man condemned to death. I can take in so little, and my heart starts to slow. I can’t breathe, can’t see, can’t feel myself move. I watch my legs rotate my body in circles on the floor like a spinning ferrous wheel with no shiny horses to hold on to. The air is heavy and thick, and it goes down like corrosive, grainy whiskey. This prodigal son gained the world, forfeited his soul, found no solace there, and trudged back home, beaten by the world and hopeful for grace. I find myself wanting nothing more than to know of love beyond me and my dreary, pig-sty moment.

I can’t justify loving a death row inmate. Your misdeeds and sin and utter disregard for human life gives me right to hate you, to hate you so much that I wish you dead and eagerly anticipate your day of lethal injection. Your mistakes are too great to forgive, too disturbing to warrant my love. Your choice got you here, and you will pay the price for your mistake. Grace is beyond you. Grace died when you took that innocent, defenseless life. A life for a life, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. The gavel goes down, the lawyers walk away, the crowd murmurs something about being deserving of death, and you are rendered incapable of receiving love from this time forward. I am angry, and you are a murderer. But, surely anger against my fellow brother warrants nowhere near the same sentence as the heinous act of murder does for you. Surely, the two are not the same. Surely, they don’t deserve the same punishment. Surely.

The water pours in through the cracked window and quickly saturates the carpet upon which I lie. I roll onto my back and feel the water rise around my ears–up to my chin–filling the space between my sealed lips. My hair moves in the water like coral polyps growing on a reef. I can sense the water flooding my space, filling the gaps around me, invading my existence until nothing else remains. I breathe you in and hold on as though you could be the last breathe I ever receive. And when I can’t hold on any longer, I swallow your love, sit up, arise from the water, embrace new life, and begin to stand again. The water continues to flow in through the window. The pressure builds, the glass begins to delicately crack, and I, prone to devastation and deserving of worse, walk away to higher ground. The levee breaks, and my art is blurred, colors and shapes ruined as they sink into the darkness of the deepening ocean. I leave the canvases behind. I get up, leave my tax collectors booth, and simply start following. I wonder, “Why would you save me? Why would you love me? Why would you rescue this broken soul from certain darkness and death?” Your love leaves me in wonder.

Growing In Grace

Your love, once a small tremor within me, has completely woven its way into every fiber of my being. Your vine wraps around my heart, moves into my lungs, pierces my soul, cracks my flesh, and breathes new life into my mouth, new air into my deflated, torn lungs. Your branches send blood to my limbs, and your water calms my trembling hands. I wrestle with the floor no more. From higher ground I watch as my grave is filled in, and my tombstone is shattered into a million little pieces. Where O death is your victory; where O death is your sting.

You love me regardless of absolutely anything. You love me in spite of my flaws. You love me in spite of what I have done to you. You love me in spite of it all. I spat on you, mocked you, threw rocks at you, tore the clothes off of you, falsely accused you, beat you, ripped the skin off of your bones, scraped the hair from your scalp, cursed you, denied you, pierced your flesh, ended your life, buried you, and tried to forget you. I did all of these things, laughing and cheering along the way. I terrorized you and took your very life, yet still you love me. Nothing I do can keep you from loving me. Nothing I say can harness your love. You are incapable of conditions. You are unwilling to let me go. Nothing can steal me from your hand. You love me no matter what I have or have not done. You love the terrorist, the death row inmate, and even me.