On being woke

I’ve mostly blocked all those who cause me unrest or threaten me. But every once in a while I hear something like, “All my friends say you went woke.”

To me, that’s the strangest insult a professing believer can hurl at someone since “a friend of sinners”.

To be woke is to be awake. And it is the best thing that has happened to me, even though it often makes me want to rise with the roosters and scream at the new day.

I used to sleep through the abuse, the degradation, the sexual harassment, the racism, the horrors of American History –

Is it better being awake? I see the horrors. I feel deeply the hundreds of years of hopelessness degradation and pain inflicted on image-bearers of God in the cotton fields. I can’t even imagine the trauma. I can’t imagine being forced at gunpoint in the middle of the night to cross a river with your small children, watching them drown behind you with nothing you can do about it.

I can’t imagine watching drunken white men with rifles rape your wives and daughters and then kill them in front of you for fun.

And I can’t imagine whitewashing it, as if it didn’t happen. To repent means to fully acknowledge the pain you have caused and turn from it.

So yes, being awake hurts. It feels deep and cutting.

But I can’t sleep again. To be asleep to it is to be dead. To be alive and to love, and to feel brings pain, but also brings longing and hope and the eyes to look for a new day when justice rains down like water on a dusty land. How do you long for justice when you are dead?

I wish that everyone would wake up. I pray that the light of Christ would fill the soul with the same tears that fall over Jerusalem.

O, Evangelical Church in America! How often would Jesus have lifted you up in his loving arms and taught you love and mercy and grace and peace! How often would he have exchanged your nuclear weapons for joy! How often would he have torn down your walls and given you goodness and faith and love! But you would not. You exchanged it for pride and money and sex and entitlement and power. You found another way to break your own heart.

My tears are falling, but I’ll never be asleep again.

Arise, you who sleep, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light (Paul the apostle, from his letter to the Ephesians.)