For Wilshire Baptist Church
Yesterday I drove Wilshire pal George Gagliardi to Union Station to catch an Amtrak train for his annual November trip to Colorado, and as we got to the intersection of Elm and Houston streets, we found ourselves in a carnival of traffic and pedestrians. Only then did we realize that it was November 22 and we were at Dealey Plaza.
The scene was that of a street festival with people milling about, vendors hawking food, flags and trinkets, and tour buses unloading even more people. As we waited to turn from Elm onto Houston, we saw some kid doing tricks on his skateboard at the very point where the Kennedy motorcade started down the hill into history. And then as we turned, a pickup truck passed us with giant flags and political signs flapping in the breeze. From where we sat, it was impossible to tell if people had been drawn to the plaza to recall history or to just be a part of that scene.
I was just three years old when Kennedy was killed in Dallas. I was just coming into civic awareness during that decade of public political murders; protests and riots over equal rights and war; and cultural and generational cleaving. To be honest, I don’t know how or if that impacted me. I recall hearing my father and grandfather debating whether we were in the Biblical end times, and I remember history classes teaching me about all the eras of turmoil and war in our nation and our world. And in Sunday school, the same themes were shared with the addition of a loving God who somehow had a divine plan for it all.
Later after dropping George off at the station, I drove home with an odd sense of thanksgiving: That as messed up and tenuous as our world seems today, it has been this way before and yet we have survived. I’m not thankful that we keep creating new ways to hurt each other; I’m thankful that we keep finding ways to pull ourselves back from the brink.
Mostly, I’m thankful for a God who has been loving, generous and patient enough to let us keep trying to get it right.