To 2017 and beyond…

i imagine this might come as a surprise to some people… or maybe not.

But in the last week or so i’ve had a strong sense that God has been telling me that i need to get a little more hectic in 2017.

You might not agree with this if you were one of the people who responded with a strongly worded response to my ‘The Passion of the Chris’ blog post earlier this year. i critiqued a worship concert i went to – good and bad – and people lost their crap.

One of the main things i was trying to ask about the 30 thousand or so people who attended was, ‘If this worship is genuine, how will we see it played out in the day to day of your regular lives?’ That didn’t go down super well and i was accused of judging people’s authenticity and motivation and hearts. Fast forward to November/December where i was practically begging the church to come out and support the Peace Justice Witness teams and while some people did, there certainly weren’t close to 30, 000 people there. For me it felt like this was the burning issue of the church, and a lot of people disagreed with me, and certainly if it wasn’t true that all of us needed to be there, it surely was true that some of us did. If i honestly ask myself whether Jesus would be attending your Sunday morning church service or spending time on a University campus asking questions and interacting with the various groups of people that were there, then it’s a no brainer. If he was at your church though, there is the likelihood that he might have been throwing over something, or asking difficult questions to the leaders or those of us who think we are doing okay…

A second piece that comes to mind is the one i wrote titled, Sodomy: A South African Love story which i think was largely untouched because the title scared people away too much. But it contained a more accurate and original definition of the word ‘sodomy’ as presented by Craig Stewart at a Warehouse workshop:

The people of Sodom pursued lives of careless ease and ignored the poor on their doorstep.

And so i tweaked it a bit for us:

The [majority of] white people in South Africa pursued lives of careless ease and ignored the poor on their doorstep.

And asked some questions about what we needed to be asking and doing.

The heartbeat of that post was the idea that as in 1994, South Africa stands on a knife edge [although a lot fewer people seem to be aware of it this time because most of them are caught up in their own busy, stressful, me-focused lives] and that we cannot take too much longer to arrive at the starting line of race conversations and restitution action, else things could really go really south really quickly.

i think the work that needs to be done: the movement of the majority of white people [in terms of being conscientised], conversations and actions about reparation and land, active connection and engagement and conversation and friendship and sacrificial investment, and more is in fact a MARATHON worth of stuff.

But at the same time, i think we have closer to a SPRINT amount of time to do it in.

And then this SUPER HELPFUL piece that distinguishes between the spirit and the law:

In 1994, the LAW was ended. But the Spirit for the most part remained. The spirit of racism and entitlement and white supremacy and ‘Us and Them’ and privilege and more lived on, in some places and people completely untouched, but in the majority of the country, maybe just largely untouched.

One of the biggest questions many of us are completely confused by [but grateful for] is how did we get this far without the explosion? How have black people been so accommodating and gracious and patient and sincere in seeking reconciliation and unity and stepping so completely towards us, when we have, for the most part, remained firmly where we were before, refusing to make the necessary steps towards them.

i do not understand it. And i think i am only beginning to glimpse just how much we have been given in this regard.

But i do strongly suspect that time is running out. We have a marathon of work to do, which so many people still seem completely oblivious to, and a sprint load of time to do it in.

So those are two posts that possibly carry some of the more in-your-face heartbeat i feel God is calling me more towards in 2017.

Be afraid. Be every afraid. Or something like that. Which was the tagline to the movie ‘The Fly’. Very appropriate because in that movie it was to foreshadow that something was coming, and not exactly sure what that would look like.

But you really don’t have to be afraid. If you are living right. If you are a follower of Jesus and are seeking to love God and love people well, then there is absolutely nothing to fear. If you are not and you are someone that is feeling the call to engagement and is addressing white privilege and injustice and disparity and more, then as well.

Because those are the things i am being called more towards. This year i have been living in Isaiah and Jeremiah in the Old Testament who call the people of God to justice repeatedly – away from the comfort and the compromise and the complacency and towards those who are alone and unable to fend for themselves and strangers in this place – sound familiar?

As i looked back on some of my other blog posts from this year, it’s not that i’ve been docile or tamed or anything. An early post i shared was from my friend Linde Ndaba, called ‘For Blacks Only’ which touched on the dehumanisation of black lives, minimising racism to only action and not views and tackling whitesplaining.

i wrote a post called ‘One fight too many’ in response to a number of people who accused me of fighting for stuff a lot online and who never themselves appeared to fight for anything. i wrote ‘They should speak English’ calling all of us to be learning the predominant black African language in our region, and ‘Don’t you DARE let them give you an easier name’ to insist on all of us taking the time to learn names of people that don’t come naturally to our tongues.

‘Can’t we all just be colourblind’ challenged the notion that being colourblind is what we are aiming at, while ‘All Lives Smatter’ was a play on the idea that the hashtag that needs to be raised is #AllLivesMatter instead of #BlackLivesMatter in places where black lives have been shown not to matter equally in many ways. And then followed that up with a more direct ‘All white lives matter’ post as people continued to struggle to get it.

i managed to piss more white people off by taking on Neighbourhood Watch groups in this post on ‘Interrupting whiteness’, turned to poetry to ‘Try to help me understand’, discussed how ‘Equality is not the best thing to chase’ and looked at the i of Entitlement.

My friend Innocentia drew my attention to a tragic movie reference highlighting how white people were quicker to empathise with the X-Men than with them in ‘But pity the X-Men’, while Akala was a new voice i discovered that brilliantly put a number of these struggles into perspective in ‘Meet Akala: My new favourite guy’ and another new friend Thandi Nkomo graciously shared her views on ‘The Better Black’.

So it hasn’t been a sit back and be chilled and don’t-rock-boats year at all for me… but i really have been feeling lately like God does want things to get even more hardcore. Maybe that’s something to celebrate rather to fear. From my side it’s about making sure i have some solid sounding board people to hold me accountable so that even when the general tide is against me, i can check myself and know that i’m speaking God’s truth in love… bring on 2017…

And just finishing off this post with two others which i really enjoyed that both came after my post on the Passion. The one was my big Gatsby adventure with DJ Eazy and the other was called ‘Coffee over Pie Holes’ and contains some really helpful advice on how to engage with Trolls and other disagreeables online…

Hope you enjoy… How about you? Do you think i’ve been too mellow or too aggro in 2016?