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One of 4 brothers raised on our farm stopped by yesterday. He lived with his grandma in an old house by our tractor shed. She helped my granny. The boys and their dad helped my grandfather. They are black. My family is white. And our community has deep, systemic racial issues.
This brother, CJ, told me how my grandfather took care of him, his dad, and his brothers. How they grew up with my uncles, climbed trees together, worked together, watched TV together. How they were all devastated by my grandfather's untimely death.
He told me how my dad witnessed to him, helping him give up alcohol, turning his life around. My dad had 3 daughters, and CJ joked that he was my dad's only son. CJ held a stable city job for decades, now comfortably retired.
CJ's brother, also raised on the farm, recently died, and my dad cried upon hearing it. His life mattered.
I teared up hearing CJ's loving words of being raised on the farm, because racism runs deep here. It released some pressure in my heart. Maybe our family hadn't contributed to oppression after all.
And, yet, though these black children were raised with my aunts and uncles, treated like family, the systems in our county still worked against them. My family went to the white school. Theirs to the black one.
CJ was the only one of his siblings to graduate from high school while every member of my family graduated from college. Even after integration, my family chose private schools that wouldn't allow black students to attend until the government forced them in the 1980s.
It's complicated. There are sweet relationships, memories that mean the world to both families. But I grieve the brokenness we were both born into, that one family managed to propagate systemically though we loved the very folks denied an education by the system we supported.
The good news of Jesus equips me to examine myself and my family history this way. There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:1), so we can face head on the hard parts, the SINFUL parts, of our family histories.
We can name them, confess them, and repair the things we can. This is God's sweet gift through Christ. I am using this gift to face hard things, name them, and put my hand to the blow with brothers and sisters in Christ to right the wrongs I can. This same gospel equips you too.