The Saints of August
The saints....are coming.
The saints.
Are coming.
Ever year in August and September this song resounds in my ear. It pops, I’m sure through the speakers of many a boom box and headphone in the ears of people working and walking the streets of New Orleans too. A stark reminder of both what never lasts and all the possibilities the world contains.
I do not know where my connection to this place comes from. Except we are definitely connected by a history of remarkable Augusts & Septembers. For New Orleans we can name August Katrina and in September we can go to a statue of Steve Gleason blocking a punt, shifting the winds from gale force and destructive, to favorable for sailing on.
For me August and September has meant joining and leaving the US Military, the way war can change your life even at a far distance, getting arrested and the death of my father. My life tends to change in these two months when they come around on various years. I would be content to accept that this is the only bond I share with New Orleans. That in these months a life can both be shattered and reborn. I am a mirror of the city that care forgot in that way. And like my own reflection in a mirror I am constantly staring at New Orleans and it has taking me a decade to figure out why.
Once I traced it back to my grandmother. Who according to her friend would have lived and died in New Orleans if she would have had the chance. Apparently New Orleans is in my blood. But even that was less potent of a tie than the month of August, and the month of September.
This August as the city and the nation celebrated the 10 years passed since the floodwaters wiped so much away, I learned what I couldn’t have known then. What so many of the details of my journey and my story have concocted into a great chapter of my life. That I was going to do what New Orleans did.
This August everything was different than all the Augusts before. This August all of my heart, all of my life, all of my gifts and talents were alive and not dead. On the last Wednesday of the month-exactly 9 years since I was arrested and put in jail and forced to re-examine my life-I went into a juvenile detention facility and I started teaching the kids there that they have a story. That their story matters. And that they can learn to tell a better story with their lives than the one they are telling. My Augusts have now been redeemed.
I do this not just for them, but because my city needs these kids to thrive in order to for the city to thrive. Because a city is not a place on the map, it is the people inside. I am able to do this with these kids because of all that has happened in my life in the last 10 years and because of the blueprint New Orleans provides on how to rebuild.
My connection to New Orleans is that God was showing me how a city that is dead can live again and that this is his favorite thing to do. Make cities that have died, live again.
I didn’t know it ten years ago because I was just as washed up as New Orleans then, but New Orleans was teaching me how to live again and all it has taught me is now being taught to others.
I had no idea then, but it was God who connected me to New Orleans and only now all the letters, words, punctuation, and sentences are starting to tell the story. This is Kingdom come. On earth as it is in heaven.
The Saints....are coming.
The Saints.
Are coming.