Until last week, I saw myself as a pretty typical right-of-center white guy born and raised in the United States. I have an aversion to virtue-signaling, think that social justice warriors should be required to serve in the military before they are allowed to speak publicly, and generally thought (quietly, to myself) that for citizens of wealthy Western countries, if you were poor it was probably because you weren’t working hard enough. Probably. Despite having lived the past eight years in East Africa where I worked alongside extraordinary levels of human suffering, I’m not naturally inclined to compassion first. I’m inclined to “let’s analyze the root cause of this problem and fix it, and please don’t complain while we do so” first. However, (not for the first time in my life) my heart has been broken through this week’s events. And if you’re struggling with how to respond to the global voices being raised in response to George Floyd’s murder, I don’t have anything to teach you, and I sure don’t want to preach at you. I understand the struggle a bit, and so I want to share what happened to me this past week, and how my thinking radically changed. I am not proud of my experience. But I am compelled to bear witness to it. My initial response to the death of George Floyd and the public reaction that followed was along the lines of “I hope the police crush those opportunistic rioters”. Also, “I bet they find out that George Floyd resisted arrest and it wasn’t Officer Chauvin’s fault, just like subsequent investigations did with all those other black guys who died in police custody.” As I type this last sentence, I feel a deep grief at how heartless and anti-Christ this was. It took two days–two days–as I watched the eight minutes and forty-six seconds of a black man being murdered by a white authority figure visibly reveling in his power and supremacy–for me to feel differently. As I watched, I felt horror, grief, physically ill. And in that moment, some clarity: a recognition that my my initial “law and order” response might not be in alignment with my Christian belief system, and may in fact directly oppose it. Not in a sort of harmless, passive way, but dangerously, actively, like darkness creeping into a forest after the sun sets. Instead of “clothing myself” with “compassion, kindness, humility, and meekness” (Col 3:12), my initial response was clothed in something else. Instead of feeling the gut-wrenching (literally, in the original Greek of Luke 20:34) compassion of Christ for someone suffering, I felt something else. Not “Christ in me” (Col 1:27)…but something else. I’ve had this experience of grief and compassion once before in my life, when Mardi and I encountered the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa through a friend. It was compelling enough to lead us to sell our house, quit our jobs, and move to volunteer at a hospital in the Rift Valley in Kenya. So I’ve learned to sit up and pay attention when I have experiences like this, and compelled by this conviction, I resolved try to listen to what voices from the black community in the USA are saying. I heard black Yale theologian (and Baptist minister) Willie Jennings share his stories of being held unlawfully by the police, and say “I have learned that living the discipline of hope in this racial world requires anger. I am angry … [and] my anger is connected to the righteous indignation of God.” I heard a black pastor and mentor say “I pay attention to those who speak out about injustice, and I take note...