| Memphis School of Servant Leadership |
| Contact Information: Phone: (901) 320-7005 E-Mail: memphisssl@gmail.com |
| Our Journeys, Our Stories: |
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| My Deepest Pain by Billy I was the director of a youth center in Ripley, Tn. Midway through the summer, on a Friday night, three young African American boys came to the center and asked if they could participate. We had a pool table and a ping pong table, music and cards and loads of youth participating, but they were all white youth up until that point. Ironically this center was in the center of the town and much closer to the homes of these three young guys than to any of the white youth who were there. When they came to the door and knocked everything slowed down, grew quiet, and all eyes turned toward me with the clearly implied question: What are you going to do? I invited them in and within minutes the games picked back up. If anything it was one of the more joyful Friday nights at the youth center we had had all summer. For the next few weeks both black and white youth used the center, again, joyfully and without incident. I was young and naïve. I didn’t see it coming. One Friday night the mother of one of the white youth came to pick her daughter up and was “shocked” by what she saw. When I refused her request to send the black youth away she drove to the pastor’s house to inform him of this grave situation. Within minutes the pastor wheeled around the corner in his pickup truck, in jeans and a pajama top, and demanded that I send “them” away. When I said that I couldn’t and wouldn’t do that he replied, as if talking to himself, that he supposed I was right, that legally we couldn’t do that. He rushed inside, pulled the plug on the music box and announced that everyone had to leave, that the center was closed for the night. The message couldn’t have been more clear. One by one the youth filed by, walking past the pastor and me as they exited the center. As long as I live I will never forget the looks on their faces – but particularly the look of pain on the young African American youth that had first knocked on that door and asked for permission to be a youth among youth. To this day that look haunts me. I followed the pastor to his house and we argued for over an hour before I turned in my resignation and left a note on the door of the center saying “closed for the summer.” He told me that night that he agreed with me theologically and morally, but that the people who paid the bills at the church did not and that we couldn’t go against the will of these people. My deepest pain? It wasn’t the look on the young man’s face, as painful as that memory is. My deepest pain was the loss of the church that night. In a very real sense I had grown up with two clearly identified “loyalties” in my life – the nation and the church. By this time in my young life I had already faced the loss of nation as an umambiguous “good.” Being in Memphis during the sanitation strike and the assasination of Dr. King and seeing the powers and principalities at work in those events – coming of age in the midst of Vietnam and Watergate – re-reading history and seeing the genocide of the native American and the slavery that established the American economy – all had taken away the god-like status with which I had held this nation. But until that night in Ripley I had somehow retained the Church as a kind of god – as a place and a people who, though flawed, were mostly about the will and ways of God in the world. On that night in Ripley, the pastor’s words that the people who pay the bills determine our actions in the church ripped from my heart a bedrock that I had counted on in this all too chaotic world. Over the next several months I was reeling. On the surface I managed a decent façade, and I received enough affirmation for standing my ground from family, friends and mentors that no one, and least of all me, understood the depth of pain and despair I was experiencing. Six months later I crashed. Fortunately I was, at that time, surrounded by wonderful family and friends and mentors who never flinched at my brokenness, who bore the pain with me and helped me to begin a healing that, in some ways, continues to this day. I shudder to think what might have happened without such support – which is another way of saying that I learned, paradoxically, how important it is to be part of the ecclesiola (little church) in the midst of the terribly fractured ecclesia. |