Who's In Charge?

The pastor asked if he could take me to lunch. I was eager to say yes. After the meal arrived, he asked me if my wife could stop causing trouble. He promised me that the church leadership would handle the situation. But the trouble wasn't my wife. It was that a pedophile was entering an area designated for children. That's when I learned that my seat at the table was meant to silence a threat.

While visiting Chattanooga, I walked to the Walnut Street Bridge and found a plaque honoring Ed Johnson. I learned that in 1906, a sham jury trial sentenced him to death for raping a white woman. While in jail, he committed himself to Jesus and was baptized. But after the U.S. Supreme Court intervened, the sheriff dismissed nearly all the guards from their posts. That night, a mob forced its way into the jail so it could hang Ed from the second span of the bridge. His final words to his murderers were, "God bless you all, I am an innocent man."

At the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, I walked up to a lunch counter and put on headphones. Immediately, I was dropped into 1960s Greensboro, hearing the dull thuds of angry hands and feet colliding with human flesh, and threats to kill me. Each year, around 250,000 people visit the museum and remember why we honor these non-violent protestors.

In Barracks 28 of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, Betsie ten Boom coughed on a bed stuffed with fleas and lice. Corrie carried her on a stretcher to the hospital ward, where Betsie whispered her final words. She whispered, we "must tell people what we have learned here. We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still. They will listen to us, Corrie, because we have been here" (The Hiding Place, 227). Corrie wrote her words down, giving hope to tens of millions of people in over sixty languages.

In 203 AD, a 22-year-old mother sat in a suffocating Roman dungeon, separated from her infant son. When her father begged her to offer a small pinch of incense to the emperor to secure her freedom, Vibia Perpetua pointed to a water pitcher. She asked, “Can it be called by any other name than what it is? Neither can I call myself anything else than a Christian.”