Most always, when I pen a spiritual devotional or a religious article such as appears below, I attempt to ground it in a particular scripture of the Bible. On the other hand, I often encounter stories that, to me, express the nature or will of God and think, “That should be in the Bible.”
An example is the parable of the blind men and the elephant. It would make an acceptable, poignant parable. Or an epistle that could, to me, perhaps be included in the letters of the Bible is Dr. King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail.
I once heard the late Georgia Representative John Lewis share a story from his childhood to describe how people can face difficult challenges and still make the world better. In this profound time when Americans are so divided, and differences of opinion, political or otherwise, have been allowed to fester into actual hate and animosity, it is evident that Lewis’ experience is relevant. And so I share it.
Young John, and some fifteen children his age were outside his aunt Seneva’s house, playing in her dirt yard. In the afternoon, the sky clouded over, the wind began to blow stronger, lightning flashed in the distance and suddenly the playing children were terrified. Even Aunt Seneva was frightened. As the only adult there she hurried the children inside as the sky blackened. All the laughter had stopped, the wind had turned thunderous and the house began shaking.
Then it got worse. The house began to sway and the wooden planked floor began to bend. Then a corner of the room began to rise. None could believe what they were seeing. The storm was beginning to lift the house.
Quickly, Aunt Seneva told the children to line up and hold hands. She would herd the children, all in a circle holding hands, to the side of the room that was lifting.
As the wind screamed and the tin roof roared with rain she would walk them to the front of the house, then back to the kitchen, wherever the house was rising. Back and forth, all around, again and again, fifteen small bodies walking with the wind and holding down that shaking house.
In the prologue to his memoir, John Lewis wrote: “More than half a century has passed since that day, and it has struck me more than once over those many years that our society is not unlike the children in that house, rocked again and again by the winds of one storm or another, the walls around us seeming at times as if they might fly apart.
“It seemed that way in the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement, when America itself felt as if it might burst at the seams—so much tension, so many storms. But the people of conscience never left the house! They never ran away. They stayed, they came together and they did the best they could, clasping hands and moving toward the corner of the house that was the weakest.
“And then another corner would lift, and we would go there. And eventually, inevitably, the storm would settle and the house would still stand. But we knew another storm would come, and we would have to do it all over again.
And we still do, all of us. You and I. Children holding hands, walking with the wind....”
If the wise and loving Lord should ever ask me what I might include in God’s perfect word, I would say, “That story John Lewis told of his childhood and Aunt Seneva—that should be in the Bible.”
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