How Broken?
The first step in painting an old deck is a good power wash. You can’t simply apply new paint over the smut of existing wood, but you need to pair it down first as best you can. So I cranked up my power washer recently and started in the northwest corner. It wasn’t long before I realized what I would have already told you: the deck is dirty. But it’s not just dirty, it is downright filthy in contrast to the part I had washed. Who knew water could make such a difference in my perception of the deck?
Not water, I mean, but pressure.
It’s an imperfect analogy, but I wonder if this pandemic is something like a big power-washing of our world, the kind that lifts the dirt out of the shadows and makes it plain to see. We don’t need anybody to tell us the world is broken — we believe in total depravity. But have we forgotten how broken? How depraved?
The power washer has been cranked up since March, but this past week we felt the toll of its blast.
Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old African American, was senselessly killed by two men back in February, and in a gross miscarriage of justice, it took 74 days before the men were charged, and that only after a video emerged of the incident. Reportedly, the two men suspected Arbery to be a burglar, on foot, in broad day light, and so they grabbed their guns, hopped in a truck, and pursued the unarmed Arbery who was jogging down the street. And they killed him.
There are countless articles about the shooting, and journalists everywhere are trying to get a beat on new details, hoping to sensationalize the story, to get more clicks or whatever they want. But it’s already enough for us to see, to be reminded, how broken this all is. The racial tensions and hostilities in America are still vicious, and being quarantined at home for 48 straight days and counting hasn’t changed that.
Remember Blaise Pascal said, “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” Distractions are diversions, Pascal says, from facing the music of our plight. Humans would rather go shopping than think about the misery of sin and its effect on our world. And well, whether in one room or not, we’ve had to stay home; and although distractions still abound (we still have our screens, after all), perhaps it’s been quiet enough for us to feel sick to our stomachs all over again. This is no time to stop our prayers, but to cry out for justice all the more. “Break the arm of the wicked and evildoer; call his wickedness to account till you find none” (Psalm 10:15).
Because it’s bad here.
Early Friday morning — Day 42 of quarantine, to my count — I received a text from a friend that Darrin Patrick had committed suicide. The official report is now “a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” and no more details have yet emerged. For those who know Darrin Patrick, he served as a teaching pastor at a megachurch in South Carolina, and before that he was the founding pastor of The Journey Church in St. Louis, vice-president of the Acts 29 Network, and the author of several books. Darin was remarkably generous, and his life touched a lot of people, including mine. I first hung out with Darrin back in 2011. We were sitting in my car at Seven Corners, by the old Chipotle, when he gave me the best advice I ever heard on church planting. He later came out to Minneapolis for a couple conferences, and we’d connect each time. He even invited me to a St. Louis Cardinals World Series game once, because he served as their chaplain and knew I loved them. He was a kind brother, but the wheels started coming off his ministry in 2016. He was fired from his church for misconduct, and went off the grid for months until reemerging in 2017 to share his story of restoration. That’s when he was brought on staff by the church in Charleston, and continued to help other pastors learn from his mistakes.
One piece that makes this especially gut-wrenching is that Darrin’s new interest was exhorting pastors in emotional health. But now he’s gone, leaving his wife and four children, and a hundred questions about the darkness that plagued him, or at least what happened in those final moments.
Which is the same darkness that is all around us, at least at some level. It’s the darkness of this broken world, the smut we tend to forget about until a blast of pressure reminds us. We are so far from home, so far from done. It’s one thing to ask, “How long, Lord?” — something God invites us to ask — and then it’s another thing to consider his patience. Who is most incensed by injustice? Who is most enraged by how the curse of sin wrecks our world at every turn?
It is the Lord.
And he will put all things right. “He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord” (Psalm 33:5). Wait and see. God help us.
