Just Say No to Red Ribbon Week

*written August 2017*

It’s time for a DRESS UP FESS UP.
Ok ok ok…so I am ALL FOR my kids not doing drugs. OBVIE.
But must we really have a full Red Ribbon Week of dress up to commemorate this desire that nearly every parent on the face of the earth shares?

Like I am sure a TON of teenagers who were about to smoke their first joint paused for a moment and remembered that day when they wore sunglasses to school in second grade— and thought, “My future’s too bright to do this.”

I’m gonna go out on a limb here but PROLLY not.

Or better yet, can we please sandwich said Red Ribbon Week between “Wear Orange for Anti- Bullying” day, “Wear school Colors” to the fall festival, “50th Day of School” fifties dress up, HoCo spirit week, and my church Trunk or Treat?

AND let’s not forget the ACTUAL dress up holiday we call Halloween happening in a week?
My kids have literally had to dress up for school 8 out of the last 10 days… and counting. Mmmmmmm K. We need to have a little talk.

If you have only boys, you may exempt yourself from reading the rest of this. Good for you. Dress up for 50th Day fifties attire for boys = jeans, a white t-shirt and hair gel. AMIRITE?
When you have a girl— or THREE girls like I do— dress up days call for all the feels.
All.The.Feels.

And it makes me want to say All.The.Words.

When you go to school with a bunch of kids who were raised on Pinterest, you get to experience all the outfit planning, all the crying, all the special hair-do’s, all the needs for the exact right shoes. Did I say all the crying yet?

None of my girls want to be Rizzo for fifties day and wear black. They want to be SANDY. And they want their hair curled. And they want an actual felt poodle on their skirt.

Can’t I just fry them an egg for breakfast and tell them “this is your brain on drugs, any questions?” and call it a week?

And guess what— since it is 80 degrees in Alabama, we don’t have our boots out yet to “Give Drugs the Boot!”. So I get to make a trip up to the attic to find three pair of said boots. Special.
Excuse me if I am a little preoccupied trying to keep all the little women alive and fed and clothed and free of head lice. Someone give me a break. Just say NO.

Red Ribbon Week is “An alcohol, tobacco, and other drug and violence prevention awareness campaign.” Forget the fact that dress up week actually makes the parents want to do all the drugs.
Can we not just add in “Anti Bullying” and call it a day? Can we not just call it the “week we bring awareness to every single thing on the planet that we do not want our kids to do EVER”?
Because really— we do not wear orange in this family.

My thoughts are this:
LESS dress up = LESS angry moms who are LESS likely to be driven to drink by Red Ribbon Week = moms who are MORE intentional in training up their kids to not do drugs = kids who hopefully by the grace of God are LESS likely to do drugs.

Perhaps the real problem is the entitlement of my own kids in all the dressing up.

Moms of the Year, for the love, please tone it down for the sake of kids like mine.
As for the rest of you, if you see my people with a picture of a poodle safety-pinned to their skirt or with their socks inside out for “Crazy Sock Day,” I hope you can just smile and say, “That mom is my kind of people.”

I wish keeping masses of people off drugs were as simple as dressing up for a week once a year. I fear the problem is much, much bigger. And it needs far more attention than a dress up week at school.
Hopefully within the walls of our homes we can speak deeply into the hearts of our children about the decision to “just say no” to drugs. Your words and actions as a parent have far more power than fancy clothes to “out dress drugs” can ever have.

In the mean time, moms everywhere, raise your glasses to “Red Ribbon Survival Week” and let’s hope and pray those crazy hats and team jerseys (Go Dawgs!) “team up” and win the war on drugs for all our sakes.

#firstworldproblems

Confessions of a Supremacist

Racial tensions are high. Political tensions are high. The marginalized, underserved, and oppressed in this country are still marginalized, underserved, and oppressed. Most of us are watching it all unfold, feeling paralyzed to do anything to stop it or change it. Maybe we are indifferent and apathetic. Or perhaps we are more interested in pointing fingers at the other side, because neither one is doing a stellar job.
There is so much hurt everywhere I look.

I live in an Alabama town being ripped in two over the alleged rape of a college student who felt betrayed by her school, the police, the hospital, and the justice system and ultimately took her life in total despair.

This town is also a hub for human trafficking along the I-20 pathway that spans the length of the United States. Just a few weeks ago, thirty people were arrested for human sex trafficking in my town. It makes my stomach turn.

Not long ago, ESPN did a segment here on how segregation is alive and well. The story focused on a nearly all black high school and somewhat unreasonable zoning that keeps our schools separated by socio-economic class.





I tell my kids all the time that we can’t control what anyone else does, but we can control what we do. The thing is, we first have to know ourselves and the tendencies of our hearts before we can be honest about where we need to change. And the subject of race, especially in the South, is a complicated one.

White, black, brown, green…we all should think deeply about the role race plays in our lives.
When I really stop and think about it, if I were to write my race manifesto, it is a complex and confusing thing. I know who I want to be and who I am on my best days, maybe even who others would say that I am, but I also know what God is teaching me about the sin of racism in my own heart. We all have stories and events that color the way we see other races.

I have relatives who fought for the Confederacy. That does not embarrass me. I don’t know that they personally owned slaves or where they landed on the abolition scale, but I do know that on some level they were fighting for their families and their neighbors and the safety and security of their property against an army that was burning entire cities to the ground. What my ancestors did does not define me. Slavery is an abomination, a horrible factor in the Civil War and a blight on the history of our country, but a history that we need to continually learn from.



My grandfather was an enormous influence in my life. He was a Harvard-educated surgeon who trained and took as his medical partner the first black surgeon in the state of Georgia in the 1950’s. He drove once a week to an out-of-town black hospital to care for patients and train the medical staff there. He took out the trash every week for his African-American neighbor who was housebound. When water started pouring from the roof of his mobile home into the living room, Papa bought his friend a new trailer and parked it on his land. He chose to be on the school board that integrated the schools in his middle Georgia city. He was ostracized by his white colleagues, hedged out socially, and received threats of violence and death.

My grandfather wrote a biography about his African-American friend, Dr. Delmar Edwards later in life and all the injustices he faced trying to get work and an education in the South. He also paid for numerous college educations, including the first black student at Columbus State (I only learned that after his death). My grandfather chose to do those things because it was the right thing to do, because his faith and his conscience could not allow him to do anything else.

My parents were both partially raised by African-American “maids” in Georgia, whom they loved as part of their families and who also loved them. In spite of their history, my parents do not view other races as subservient to them or “less than.” I know that is not the case for every similar situation, but it was for them.

I remember my mom going to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day celebration in Eatonville, a historically black community, to watch one of her students in the parade. She regularly did things like that and sometimes took us along. We went to homeless shelters and Habitat houses. I remember when she bought an impoverished student an outfit for back to school when money was especially tight for our family.

My mom and dad taught me the Biblical truth that every person is created in the very image of God, and they showed me with their lives to be as close as possible to color blind in the way I treat other people.

I have a beautiful family legacy and example of caring for the poor and the marginalized.



I spent my growing up years in Winter Park, Florida, and the black-white tensions never seemed to me to be as overt as the white-Hispanic tensions at my middle and high school. Maybe my view was skewed a bit after I was “jumped” by a group of Hispanic girls in my middle school. Even though one of my best friends growing up was Latina, from Puerto Rico, they hated me for being white.

I volunteered in college for Georgia Preview- a weekend for potential African-American students to visit the University of Georgia. I was one of only two or three white people in a sea of black people. It was the first time in my life when I felt like the overwhelming minority. I remember being embarrassed that I did not have the answers to many of their questions. Even more disturbing, I had never even thought about them. “Where does the city bus pick up? Is it easy to use public transportation to get around Athens?” “Where are the clubs and bars for black people?” “What percentage of your dorm or your classes are minority students?”

What are the stories in your past that shape how you view other races and ethnicities? They are there if you look for them.

I had a great conversation with a friend recently and we talked about how we simply can not say we are Christians and not also be about racial reconciliation in this city, in our churches, and in our own personal lives. In order to be the church, we have to be honest with ourselves first and confront the sin of racism in our hearts. We have to confess and repent so God can work.

Which brings me to my confession: I have friends of all colors and religions, AND I lock my doors when I drive through certain areas of town. I sincerely love my black friends AND I wonder how my child will handle two weeks at camp with a counselor who has dreadlocks and other kids who look so very different. I spent a year in Asia learning the culture and enjoying the people there AND I feel uncomfortable spending large amounts of time outside of my nearly all white suburbia.



Racism is rarely tipped so far to one side of the scale or the other like we saw in Charlottesville last weekend. It creeps in the little pockets of our minds and the places in our hearts that feel too difficult or too comfortable to confront, and it festers there. This is probably true for all races toward each other on some level. I have black friends who feel afraid when they are in an all white neighborhood, for totally different reasons.

When our sin stays in the darkness it manifests into fear and apathy and numbness to a problem we don’t fully understand and don’t know how to fix. If there is any silver lining to these tumultuous times, it is that we can only work to heal the wounds we know about. We can only deal with sin when it is brought out of the darkness and into light.

I may never truly understand what it is like to be black, or Hispanic, or Asian, or in a religious minority. I am not pretending I do. All of this hate spewing out of Charlottesville, and even angry counter-protesters vandalizing has me thinking about my own heart, about all of our hearts.
It feels like the weight of the world is on my shoulders. You may feel the same.

There is nothing intentional or overt about my racism. There has never been a time in my life when I have felt hate in my heart toward anyone because of the color of their skin. And yet living in the South, the physical separation of races feels like an insurmountable divide at times. It affects every part of our living.



The white majority often zones schools and builds neighborhoods and starts churches to insulate itself from people who are different. Sure, we give lip service to wanting diversity and sometimes even write checks or donate food to care for the underserved to satisfy a nagging in our hearts, but most don’t really invest the time to build bridges and friendships with people who look and live so very differently than we do.

Who do we break bread with? Who do we invite into our homes? Who do we want our kids playing with? With whom do we worship?

Do we see the poor as projects or as brothers and sisters?

I want my kids to be exposed to all different people AND I also have unfounded fears and uncertainties about it. On some level, life feels safer and more comfortable on my side of the tracks— and the prosperous ease and pride that go along with that are separating me from the heart of God. There can be a silent understanding even among Christians that we do what we deem best or safest for ourselves and our families and if that means holding onto covert racist thoughts or feelings, then that is a respectable cultural sin.

Doing what is best for ourselves contradicts the Scriptures and the life of Jesus. Jesus would be considered a minority in our country ethnically and religiously. He was mocked and beaten and marginalized. And He took the actual weight of the world and all of its problems onto His shoulders and carried it to the cross with Him. Before any torch was lit on Saturday in Virginia, Jesus died for it. The problem is a race issue, but at the heart, it is a sin issue. And sin touches all of us.



I am asking God to pry open the deep places in my heart and my life that offend Him and His people. It is painful. It is embarrassing. And just maybe no matter what color we are, we all in some way can relate to pushing away the people not like us- whether it is racial or ethnic, socio-economic or religious, those with disabilities, or those we find less desirable.

Laying ourselves bare before God and before each other is a difficult process. But if we truly want to evoke change, if we truly want God to heal us, we have to see our brokenness first.

It is no accident that God made all of us to look different. And it is no coincidence that people from every tribe and tongue and people and nation will be gathered around the throne in heaven. If I had to guess, white middle class Americans will be a serious minority there.

We have to passionately pursue the heart of God so we know what breaks His heart. We need to go there with Him and be honest with ourselves and with each other. He already knows. And He wants to carve out the gross, distorted places of our beliefs and norms. He wants to change us all from the inside out. If we tear down statues but have hearts of stone, what have we accomplished?



Just after the sky went dark over two thousand years ago in Jerusalem, Jesus rose from the dead and conquered racism and every other sin for all of us. It may feel like the sky is dark now- and actually it will literally go dark on Monday all across the United States (in case you haven’t heard!). But on Tuesday the sun will be unobstructed.

I pray that the light of the Son finds a way into the darkness of all our hearts.
So yes, I am a supremacist. I believe I am supremely flawed. I believe that God alone is supremely holy and just and loving and able to do much more than we ask or imagine. I know it is supremely painful to invite Him into the dark, disgusting places of my heart and begin to sanctify them. And I believe that we are supremely incapable of transforming our cities and communities without the hope of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

This is incredibly challenging work to truly love our neighbors as ourselves, but it will be supremely worth it because it glorifies a supremely worthy God.

Psalm 99:2 “The Lord is mighty in Zion; He is supreme over all the nations. Everyone will praise His great and majestic name. Holy is He!”

*written August 2017*