One of my heroes is a man named Daniel.
Like his namesake in the Bible, Daniel faces lions unafraid. He so heavily leans on the Lord that the lions can’t get between him and God.
This Daniel, the one I know, spends his days in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago. He goes because he cares. He won’t give up on those whom most everyone else has.
The lions aren’t the people. The lions are poverty, hopelessness, rejection, fear, and all the other evils that prowl their neighborhood.
I spend a day with Daniel in this Chicago neighborhood. He pulls open the gates of his house and kids saunter into the yard. He knows each by name, has known them for the span of their lives. He knows that too many of those lives will be cut short.
He loves while he can.
The girls’ braids are thick and their smiles unafraid. Some carry babies on their hips. The boys wear pants hanging low and play basketball on the cement pad below the porch. They say hello, even though I’m a stranger and look so out of place. They greet Daniel with affection. He’s a constant in their fragile world.
Many have known jail, cops relentlessly hounding them, bullets, and fear. They’ve known hunger and homelessness and abandonment. School is a waste of time or just plain dangerous to get to and from. Jobs are tough to come by and tougher to keep for a kid who hasn’t grown up knowing what responsibility looks like. Dads aren’t around to lead. The line between moms and kids is blurred; many are both.
One of the boys I recognize. He’s come out to our mostly white suburban church with Daniel in the past, and he always is polite. Daniel points out the cops who circle the block waiting to catch him up to no good. Daniel defends him to me, saying he likely did nothing but is an easy target. He predicts that one of these days the boy would give up on being good because it just isn’t worth it here where only bad is expected. My heart aches for this boy.
I think of my own boys back home, smothered in love and most everything they need. It just isn’t fair.
I read what I can to learn what I don’t know. Books like Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help and Charity Detox: What Charity Would Look Like if We Cared About Results, both by Bob Lupton. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. The Briarpatch Gospel by Shayne Wheeler. Tattoes on the Heart by Gregory Boyle. I don’t agree with everything, but I’m learning. And watching Daniel.
Boyle illustrates how God-sized compassion eats into the heart of the lions in these urban ghettos. He uses one of my favorite words: kinship. He says,
“You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear…
I want to lean into the challenge of intractable problems with as tender a heart as I can locate, knowing that there is some divine ingenuity here, ‘the slow work of God,’ that gets done if we’re faithful.”
I love those words. Kinship wins over success. There is a slow work of God that gets done if we’re faithful.
My own son will spend a week with Daniel and his family in this neighborhood this summer. I pray that he starts to grow a kinship with the kids here.
I pray that he will learn how to lean heavily on a God at work in the lions’ den. A God who delivers and rescues, who works signs and wonders, who saves.
I pray that he, like Daniel, will see the people through the problem. After all, that’s what Jesus did for us.
Hope and Be.Longing
Do you see problems or people?
…(H)e is the living God, enduring forever; his kingdom shall never be destroyed, and his dominion shall be to the end. He delivers and rescues; he works signs and wonders in heaven and on earth, he who has saved Daniel from the power of the lions. (Daniel 6:26-27)
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