These Waters

So I am here. Among the poor, the intelligent, the hardly lucky, the hardly privileged I stand out rich, ignorant, lucky and privileged. Is it my skin tone? Can I reconcile that it just might be? But I am not responsible for where I came from. I did not decide who my parents would be.

Forgive me for my excuses.

But it's the poor's fault for being poor. Is it the widow's fault for being a widow? Is it the fault of those without a father that they are fatherless?

Yet we blame the poor, shake our heads at them from afar and click our tongues, condemning laziness, stupidity and dumb in people we have turned a deaf ear to; people we do not know. Did they choose who their parents would be? Did they choose where they would be born?

Jesus did not shake his head from afar and condemn us even when we deserved it. No. He jumped into these waters, he listened to our stories, spoke to our hearts, sometimes cryptically, always in love. He drowned in these waters so the water would not drown us. He rose out of the deep so we would not sink to the depths.

Then he asked us to do the same.