Friday night was the visitation for Yore Jieng, a 14-year old boy from my church who was shot and killed while riding in a car near his home. Yore's parents were Nuer refugees from South Sudan. At the visitation members of his family and the larger Nuer community were visibly and audibly distraught and physically overcome with grief. Many of his family left before the visitation began because they were too overwhelmed. My heart hurt for the pain they were going through.
After an hour-long viewing for the family, the grieving public started to arrive. Hundreds of them, from all across the city. Urban and suburban; rich and poor; white, black, and brown; citizen and refugee. Two white police officers who work downtown were present because our Pastor asked them to be around. This is what you do when a child is murdered and his killer is still at-large and hundreds of sad and angry people are gathered to mourn.
The police officers stood outside and quickly became greeters for the mourners. They knew many of the Nuer kids by name. They gave hugs. They expressed condolences to the kids who were sad, and the kids returned with condolences of their own. The police and young people talked together, laughed together, cried together, and grieved together. And the police officers weren’t the only ones with this kind of interaction. Teachers, pastors, mentors, volunteers, and community organizers all had similar exchanges with the kids. The beauty in these moments was almost more than I could bear.
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On Sunday morning in worship we lit candles for All Saints Sunday. Yore’s parents, Lory and Andrew, lit candles at the front of the sanctuary for their slain son. As Lory turned the corner and started walking back to her pew, she spotted another woman, Kim, a few people behind her. Kim was sobbing. Lory stopped, waited for other people to walk past, and embraced Kim after she lit the candle. These two mothers held each other as they walked slowly back to their pew. Kim's daughter had suffered multiple broken bones in a car crash earlier in the year. Kim was lighting a candle for her daughter’s boyfriend who died in the crash.
I was astonished to learn after the service that Kim and Lory had never met prior to that moment. They didn’t know each other’s stories. But Lory felt the anguish of another person and reached out in love and concern. That Kim is white and Lory is black is noteworthy, but their shared humanity is what makes this story transcendent.
If you wake up some mornings and feel that there's more evil and darkness in the world, you may have been right. But it doesn’t necessarily mean any of the goodness and light went away. The people who you love and who love you are, likely, still here. The church is still here. The Lord Jesus is still here. The people who came together in my faith community over the past two weeks are still here. Their stories didn’t go away. And there will be more of these stories that blossom in the days ahead.
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I am constantly adjusting the brightness setting on my phone. When I’m outside in the sun, I have to turn up the brightness. When it’s dark, I can turn the brightness down to save the battery. Light shines brighter in darkness. The emergence of darkness allows a chance for light to shine all the brighter. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not—and will not—overcome it.
