Pastor Carias and his family had done everything right. We in his network of supporters had done everything that normally should have resulted in a just outcome. We had to face that these were not normal times; we had to examine our methods.
We pray for others far away
Who’ve seen destruction, too;
We look beyond ourselves, for they
Are also loved by you.
We have reasons for our distrust. Congress seems more intent on partisanship and on campaigning than they are on acting as public servants. They advocate for a different health care system for the rest of us than they do for themselves. They fail to stick to campaign finance reform and they protect their own version of insider trading. All of this plays a role in our distrust. But there’s a deeper core issue at play.
An interactive map, courtesy of USC Dornsife's Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration, illustrates estimated numbers of populations who are DACA eligible, and numbers of actual DACA recipients by congressional districts. In the aftermath of the abolishment of DACA, the Department of Homeland Security has set a deadline for all individuals eligible to renew DACA by Oct. 5.
As recently as 2013, dozens of women uploaded videos online of themselves behind the wheel of a car during a campaign launched by Saudi rights activists. Some videos showed families and male drivers giving women a “thumbs-ups,” suggesting many were ready for the change.
While women in other Muslim countries drove freely, the kingdom’s blanket ban attracted negative publicity. Neither Islamic law nor Saudi traffic law explicitly prohibited women from driving, but they were not issued licenses and were detained if they attempted to drive.
The test for religious leaders in this context has been nothing short of a demand for a prophetic voice which sees, names, and challenges the reality of a system that destroys the lives of some while parading as “law and order” for others. Faith leaders are finding themselves tangled in a quagmire of competing rhetoric about what makes for peace, walking the line of proclaiming prophetic vision amid a culture, a church, and a people tightly wrapped in the clutches of white supremacy.
The Sept. 24 shooting that left one woman dead and seven others injured conjures up memories of high-profile attacks, like the June 2015 massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina that left nine dead.
By the grace of our God, you brought life to the earth;
As you healed those in need, you saw each person’s worth.
May we who proclaim you now answer your call
To bring hope and healing — and health care to all.
Grace works that way. People come into our lives unexpectedly and show us things we need to see. Those people and those moments become edge pieces for us, if we let them. It’s good to remind ourselves of that now, when we’re so divided and disconnected that we can’t even see the picture we’re meant to form together. We’ve forgotten that each of us is a piece of something bigger than ourselves.