Think About it -- Beyond Harsh Words

Forgive me for posting a Think About it article beyond my rule of 400 words maximum. This was so good however, I had to post the whole thing. Whether you are a law-enforcement officer, a faith-based security operator, pastor, chaplain or emergency responder there is applicable perspective here for you. It dead centers that which makes church security different from any other.

That is this, that we show Christ to all – including those who are older, poorer, weaker, sadder, and sicker. Many of those characteristics often dwell in the criminal. Our duty is to protect, but our existence is to represent Christ.

It is written by my brother, Ed Chinn. If you wish to subscribe to Ed’s life-giving writings, instructions to do so are at the end of the article.

Beyond Harsh Answers. By; Ed Chinn

Her move from her home to assisted living had not gone well, and she decided this was the time to let me have it. Of course it was. She knew this might be the last time we would see each other.

As soon as I sat down, she asked me, her firstborn, “Why am I here?”

And I heard myself say, “Because your personal care needs have grown beyond what your family can provide.”

I instantly hated the way those words felt in my mouth. Like marbles—too smooth. Accurate, but too sleek. Cold, unreal, evasive. They gave me power and protection while leaving her little space or grace.

She kept going, her eyes like lasers. “Your daddy and I built our home. It’s right over there (she pointed). It’s paid for; it’s mine. Why can’t I just go home?”

I wanted to throw up. I could see that she had been suffocating under a blanket of reasonable, dehumanizing logic: What happened to my life? Why am I held captive so near my home? Why am I spending $5,000 a month for this 340-square-foot box when my home costs me nothing?

“Mom, I wish you could go home, but you can’t take care of yourself.”

“I know, Ed—” she broke. “BUT MY SONS … DON’T WANT ME!”

There it was.

I couldn’t imagine what it cost her to face that reality, much less say it aloud. Everything in me protested. Her three sons and daughters-in-law did want her. We deeply loved her. No one carried unresolved mommy stuff. Vernon and Betty had cared for her long and sacrificially from their home next door. Carl and Deana had invited Mom to live with them in Colorado.

And yet, in the way that mattered most to her in that moment, she was right.

Our lives, our homes, our patterns of living—our own aging selves—could not absorb the disruption of a 96-year-old woman with serious health needs.

Her wet, pleading eyes searched my face. Was she looking for some spark of hope, some evidence that the Christ lived in me?

Then, dreading the moment and feeling the pressure to get on the road, I stood.

“Mom, I love you so much. But we have to go.” As I hugged her, my own emotions seemed to give me permission to leave.

But she wouldn’t let go that easily. She escorted me out of her room, down the hall, down the elevator, and right out the front door. As I approached my car, she began to sob into my chest.

After holding her for a few minutes, I said, “Come on, Mom. We don’t live here. We have to go home.”

“I know,” she wept as she studied her feet.

And suddenly I saw the child she had once been in rural Missouri, frightened and crying because the road had washed out, the water kept rising, and Daddy was gone.

Now the road had washed out again. She had no path forward.

In the end, she seemed like a frightened citizen in an occupied country. She did not understand all the noises from the street, why strangers entered her room day and night, or why they sometimes spoke to her in the language of schedules, medications, rules, and routines. I know; they had work to do.

The poor plead for mercy, but the rich answer harshly.

(Proverbs 18:23)

Harsh answers are often the language of people who must make things work. They keep the schedule, enforce the rules, solve the problems, get everyone back on the road. Sometimes they are even correct.

But correct answers can so easily and so often wound.

Older, poorer, weaker, sadder, sicker people understand this. But when so much has already been taken from them, what they may need most is not another explanation of the way things must be, but a little tenderness in the midst of the way things are.

Isaiah imagined such tenderness when he wrote of One who “will not cry out or raise his voice, who will not break a bruised reed or extinguish a dimly burning wick, but will bring justice to those who have been wronged.”

In her death four months later, that was the world Mom entered, a world where bruised reeds are handled gently and no one has to plead for mercy.

As I get closer to the place where Mom once stood, the distance between the two of us has grown strangely short. Things I once understood from the fortress of the strong, I now glimpse from the camp of the aging.

Now I understand these famous words from George Washington Carver are not philosophical; they are a warning:

“How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.”

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