Love is always the answer

It's Black History Month, which is still a thing and even more needed now with the great opposition to teaching much of our history. What are we so afraid of? Why don't we want to know the truth of our past? Interesting questions to ponder. 

Some of the schools in Peoria had the above sign displayed on their marquees this month. Celebrating resilience. This sentence struck me as I don't think of resilience as something to be celebrated. What does resilience mean? According to the dictionary, resilience is "the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties." Ugh, I hate difficulties and relative to much of the world, I've had very few of them. Even so, I view resilience as a necessary evil, a quality developed to respond to hard, challenging times. It's cultivated through gritted teeth in tough predicaments, which often seem like they defeat us. Maybe like the people who don't want to learn our history, warts and all, I don't want to have to develop resilience. I'd rather ignore tough times. But that's not the way life works. 

Pairing Martin Luther King's photo with celebrating resilience is perfect as he is its model. All the hatred and fake politeness and the it's-not-time-yet thrown at him and black Americans--culminating in his assassination--for me it's hard to celebrate the resilience required to face that, to not hate, to carry on, to hope and plan and work for a better day. 

I think the next four years are going to be hard. We are going to need resilience to be able to continue to work for a community, country, and world of justice, that values all people. It can't all be doom and gloom. Like the sign says, we need to celebrate the resilience--the flexibility, the capacity, the strength, the perspective--that allows us keep going, to get to that mountaintop, to make the Promised Land a reality for all God's children.