So I learned something today that I didn’t know. Today is the one-year anniversary of this blog! Exciting! I didn’t post 52 weeks in a row. I didn’t even post 26 weeks of the 52 weeks in a year. I figured I should write something anyway for the anniversary of the blog. I couldn’t think of what I wanted to talk about and then I realized what I wanted to talk about.
Some of you who are family members or know my family know that my mom runs a non-profit organization in the San Fernando Valley called MEND, which stands for Meet Each Need with Dignity. They provide food, clothing, classes, and medical services to low-income families in the the cities around Pacoima. This morning I received an email from my mom with a link to photos of MEND’s grand re-opening of their Education and Learning Center and it triggered a stream of consciousness in my already “mile-a-minute” mind. Oddly enough it brought to mind the themes and focus of the most recent Kendrick Lamar album, To Pimp A Butterfly. Here is an excerpt from the email I sent my mom in response to the photos she sent me.
“ In my mind [To Pimp A Butterfly] is a very provocative album title because pimp usually doesn’t share phrases with words like butterfly with pimp being a very abrasive and angry word and butterfly signifying one of the most beautiful things in the animal kingdom. In the album he describes the meaning as ethnic minorities being like caterpillars who have developed into butterflies, beautiful and unique, yet because of the institutions of the nation are forced to pimp themselves out to survive and in doing so further deepens the institutionalization. I think in the last year or so I’ve come to observe more of this around me by looking at the news and even in just social observation of LA when I drive around. Its really a discouraging realization that there are social constructs that keep ethnic minorities under a glass ceiling and part of me shares a feeling that many of these people are ethnically similar to me yet I was fortunate to be adopted by a family who provided me opportunity.
Those are kind of depressing thoughts but the purpose of my message isn’t to focus on that. The pictures from the grand re-opening reminded me of the theme of this album because it made me realize that by providing the education and training services that you do AND by providing a top notch environment for those services (rather than a shabby and dull environment) you’re enabling, uplifting, and in a sense shattering that glass ceiling for people who could live their entire life as butterflies pimped out to the world. The way I see it, you and the people at MEND are acting as a catalyst to break this cyclical institution of poverty in the San Fernando Valley. “
As a Christian my mind is flooded with thoughts and ideas of how I should be living out my faith in my worldly context and along with this comes a myriad of conflicting worldviews and arguments for this or for that. Black and white boxes that we are forced to choose from. At the end of the day the only black and white decision I have come to as a follower of Jesus Christ is that my sole purpose before all else is love. It may seem cliched to quote 1 Corinthians 13:1 “if I speak in the tongue of men or of angels, but don’t have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal” but there is more to be said for this. This verse is offensive. It’s not passive or trite. The work being done at MEND and at other like-minded organizations does nothing for the people who are content with their lives. The work that they do, driven entirely by love and care, is a type of work that goes to the people living in malcontent. It is focused on people who have become the result of social institutions that keep people where they are “meant to be”. This should bother everyone, Christian or otherwise.
To quote Michael Gungor, “If it’s us or them, it’s us FOR them”. Such a simple phrase yet I know that if we all lived with this as our motto the world would look completely different.
I apologize if any of this seemed all over the place but here is my TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read): no matter what background you come from the simplest solution to our state as a world is love; love where love is not deserved, expected, and even rejected. I won’t pretend to be a social science expert or an expert on the theology of love. I only know that all our social injustices and attacks against each other need to heal and the only way to do that is starting with love.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt1u81dQf2U
