Struggling not to run away from the wall…

Vincent Harding wrote this in his introduction to a re-issue of Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited:

… those people who live most obviously with their backs against the wall – for instance, the homeless, abusers, the alienated, misguided, and essentially abandoned young people -- are rarely within hearing or seeing range of the company of Jesus’ proclaimed followers. The keepers of the faith of the master often find it very difficult, and very dangerous, to follow him into the hard places inhabited by the disinherited of America. And those wall-bruised people find no space for their presence in the places where the official followers are comfortably at worship… (xiv)

I aspire to changing. I aspire to being someone who follows Jesus and thus who walks alongside those who have their backs against the wall. I learned yesterday that doing so means my own back will be against the wall. This is not the first time I’ve had that experience, but it continues to be deeply painful…