Waiting for another

This morning I sat in a circle of white faces, reading the lectio divina on hope.

The word moved around the room, and then the conversation followed it — people saying they don't have hope. That the violence and injustice will never end. That rights are being taken, one by one, and there's nothing underneath to catch the fall.

I sat with that. And underneath it, something else rose up in me, uninvited: fire hoses. Dogs straining at their leashes toward my people. And the hope that lived, somehow, in the middle of that.

We still have it.

I didn't say it out loud. Not because I didn't have words — because I knew what would happen to them the moment they left my mouth. In a room like that, my voice stops being my voice. It becomes the voice. The one account of what Black faith sounds like, offered to people who may never sit across from another Black believer again. I wasn't willing to hand over something that sacred to become someone else's whole understanding.

So I kept it. Not as silence born of fear, but as a kind of stewardship.

Here is what I would have said, if the room could have held it:

This is not spiritual bypassing. I am not asking anyone to look away from what is broken. I looked directly at the hoses and the dogs and did not look away — and hope was still there, waiting. Because the hope was never in the circumstances changing. It was in the God who sees, who loves, who cares, who has not turned His face from any of it. The hope is that all of it — the fire, the loss, the fear rippling through that room today — sits inside a Divine plan that is still unfolding, still being written, still held.

That is a harder hope than the one that needs things to get better first. And I understand why a room newly afraid could not yet reach for it.

So I waited. I went looking for others who might already be standing in that hope — a circle rooted in the same soil, a Christian silence shared with people who carry both my faith and my history. What I found instead, more than once, was borrowed teaching. Buddhist instruction leading a Christian practice. Something true, offered from somewhere else, standing in for what I was actually looking for.

So I am still waiting. And writing, instead of speaking — because maybe someone will stop here, read this, and recognize themselves in it.

If that's you: I would love to hear from you. Even if it's only the two of us, traveling this road together for a while.