Against the backdrop of a city shackled by a virus, a black man’s life was wrongfully taken. 

The man who killed him lived a 3-minute walk from my house. We were neighbors. I took my dog for a walk past his house the day after he was arrested, the same day that my dearly loved Twin Cities were smoldering from the chaos of the night before. When I turned to my left, I was met with a blossoming lilac bush and the view of a lovely, quiet, unassuming park where life was, as it seemed,  business as usual. When I turned to my right, my eyes darted over the words scrawled in spray paint across his garage and written in chalk on the street and sidewalk below my feet. 

What a sobering juxtaposition of beauty and pain. One that my heart can ache for, but never truly understand its extent. I try to shift my perspective from my own to my black brothers and sisters, who have been created in God’s image, to imagine what could lead to such outrage, anger, destruction, and sorrow.

Imagine that for nearly 400 years you and people who look like you have been crying out to be heard in the country you call home and that those that don’t look like you won’t listen. That the system in which you live is not for you, and even worse, working against you?

Wouldn’t you be angry? 

Imagine there is a city where police officers kill people who look like you at a rate that is 13% higher than people who look differently. That the color of your skin causes you to shrink in the face of a person who is meant to protect you. 

Wouldn’t you be scared?

These are issues that I have never had to face. Things that I can only imagine and never fully grasp. If you’re reading this, there’s a really good chance that you can say the same as me. 

While it breaks my heart to see the destruction happening throughout the Twin Cities over the last week, what breaks my heart even further is there are human beings, so deeply wounded and so unheard, that feel the only way to make their case known is lash out in anger. Something that my white privilege will never allow me to understand. We can be sad about the buildings that have burned, the stores that were looted, and the businesses and homes that were lost, but may that NEVER be more devastating to us than the loss of a precious life that God created. One that Jesus (a brown man) came to show the way for, to suffer for, and to save, just like he came to save yours and mine. 

While I am brokenhearted for George Floyd and those that loved and knew him, I am thankful for the ways that this tragedy that has happened in my own city has brought light to how I have been ignorant and complacent in the conversation about racism. That by living a life of comfort and safety in my whiteness, I have been complicit in bias, in prejudice, in discrimination, in racism. And to all black lives and people of color, I apologize for my first 31 years of ignorance and carelessness, and I promise to spend the rest of my years educating myself and starting conversations with people who look like me with a prayer that they, too, can learn along with me.