Storing a Bomb

Beirut’s explosion images show a distinctive orange cloud of ammonium nitrate burning, with “fire cracker” explosions, and then an atomic looking shock wave, and explosion, and the shock wave knocking down a photographer and camera scuttling on the ground.

The resultant horror shows warehouses incinerated, blast damage for kilometers, people caught in the blast, and where the sea took a bite out of the port. 

Far worse. The court and port batted the issue of improperly stored ammonium nitrate back and forth for years.  The boat owners abandoned it.  The single smart move in the entire nightmare. 

The hitch in holding a toxic, explosive thing, is that over time, you think of other things.  New priorities, new problems steal your attention.  You never become “comfortable” with this insane thing you harbor, just distracted.  You grow accustomed to the fact, “Oh yeah, I have that nightmare in there.”

And your urgency blanches into complacency, until a day you walk out and see a fire, and you think, “Oh no.  Isn’t that where we keep that — ”

Boom.

Once a year, towns have a “bring anything in you should not be keeping in your house” day. 

Once a year is too slow for emotional/relational poisons.  Before another birthday, find forgiveness, confess to a priest or friend, make amends, see a counselor, initiate a program to exorcise a nightmare, before a fire kindles too close to your explosive toxicity, and “boom” you can take nothing of it back. 

They knew.

They argued.

They did not get rid of it. 

You know….

If not ephemeral but everlasting

If we are ephemeral.  If dust to dust is all we get, then racism is tough for some, and works in the favor of others. 

If we are ephemeral, then Wilberforce, Douglass, King and others of faith were well meaning, but deluded as to the individual’s significance. 

If we are ephemeral, then all horror stories are awful, gut-wrenching, and dehumanizing: but “it” happens. 

However, if we are eternal, then that black man lynched is an eternal creature, and the infamy perpetrated stands against eternity as blasphemy to the One who made that man to be glorious.

If we are eternal, then Wilberforce, “Moses”, Douglass, King, Owens, Abernathy and Jackson were all correct to take liberation and equality as sacred callings. 

If we are eternal, then listening to a black person sing Amazing Grace, composed at a cost we cannot fathom is a moment of grace, insurmountable in any accounting we know. 

And if we are eternal, and pass up a moment to encourage, to treat another as not our equal, but our one to serve this hour, then we miss an eternal moment to glorify the One who made that other soul of whatever color He chose. 

The Son of Man came from outside of time, to call us to Himself, but He also left a haunting legacy, “May they be one as we are one, Father.”  That sounds even more expensive than “equal”, somehow. 

I am eternally grateful for Tom Skinner, Robert Westbrook, Phillip Powell, and a host of other men who blessed me, allowed me to see through their eyes, and called me to account, to grow, to change.