People you’re related to, even if you’ll never meet, are dying.  Read that again, please. 

I ran to something penned by one of the world’s brightest stars, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  He used these and other words to eulogize the little girls who were killed in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.  I think his words relate as well today, when people continue to be killed in my immediate community and in Libya and other places, as they did in the pulpit that dark day.

Yet they died nobly.  They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity.  So they have something to say to us in their death.  They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows.  They have something to say to every politician who has fed his constituents the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism.  They have something to say…

You know that I’m writing this blog in my skin.  I’m a writer.  I’m a husband and father.  I’m a minister, raised and serving in the Christian tradition.  So everything I say is colored by the reds and blacks and purples of those identities.  This post is no different.

I’m on the other side of the world, and I’m not interested in believing that my opinion on all things international matters to anyone.  I’m not that demented.  But I do think it’s important for people–for people with or without faith, for critical people, for people engaged with life, for people who care–to stretch beyond our own worlds. 

My immediate world is Chicago, particularly Hyde Park and Logan Square neighborhoods.  My world is a classroom in Evanston.  My world is that boy I’m trying, with my wife and our family and community, to raise to be a great man.  But if I stop with my world, I’m leaner.  I’m poorer.  And I don’t want to be poor.  So I’m pushing myself to read and to watch news and to pray for the people of Libya and Egypt and the geography also known as the Middle East.