For You created my inmost being;
You knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Your works are wonderful,
I know that full well. Psalm 139
We speak of equality and justice and yet Black bodies and minds are systematically destroyed because society lacks the love and respect every human body deserves. In the beginning, God created the first human beings. His commandment for us to love Him and our fellow human beings. This truth is absolute and unchanging.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in his book Between the World and Me about the systematic humiliation and destruction of Black bodies: “all our phrasing–race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy, serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth” (Page 10). In other words, it is a physical as well as psychological trauma. The human body created by God is meant to be cherished and cared for, respected, loved.
My heart muses on the three Black bodies that God has blessed us with, two sons and a daughter. What will they have to endure? I think about our sons especially, who are criminalized from birth. They grew up in a world that believes the myth of inferiority and now as men they live in a world that still believes it. Our sweet, intelligent, loving, caring young men are judged as soon as they walk in a store or on the street because of their skin. Am I concerned about their Black bodies? Yes, I am, very much so. But I trust our Creator God to protect them from the evil of racism. They are believers, children of God. Their bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. I pray for them as well as our daughter, that they will give their bodies a living sacrifice to their God and live according to His Kingdom. Human culture is not superior to Kingdom culture. Kingdom culture is built on love and truth, justice and equality.
