Stretching to Change the world (Weirdness)

Love today, is weird.  It's weird to forgive someone for wronging you before paying them back.  To love someone who doesn't look like Zoe Saldana or Terence Howard (or whoever you women like) is well, weird.  When someone decides to spend their life's passion helping others, for little pay, especially in communities around the world, many of our sensibilities begin to oppose their idea.  How can you leave America? Where you going? For how long?

The reality is Love is a choice, a revolutionary one that is contrary to all the world (or America rather) stands for.  Love is smiling at someone who wants to spit in your face, holding doors and not caring about the thank you's.  Love is allowing yourself to get sick just so that you can show affection to your son who can only see you on weekends because he lives with his mother and not you (you know I had to throw something specific to me in there...fatherhood is my revolution :-).

(I type this post in bed.  Sick.  Beware of cute kids with coughs, sneezes, runny noses and other indicators of germs.  Their cuteness  lures you in while the germs take you down.) 

I must say that in my life I've eased up on my plans, on my endeavors, on my efforts to make sure that others around me are comfortable.  I'm guilty of taking it easy in Madden when I'm whooping someone that I always beat, of slowing down a bit in practice so that I didn't embarass one of my teammates on the track, of neglecting to mention the Master's in Education I earned in '09.  I've been pumping the brakes on my endeavors so that the Status Quo is comfortable with my maturation and progress.  I've done what Marianne Williamson described as: shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you" ("Our Greatest Fear").

With that being said, these next few years will be painful.  I will be training myself to stretch beyond the imaginary limitations that I've set for myself.  I'll be training my mind and my body to do things that it refused to do in order to be someone who people could be comfortable around.  But the genius in me, the social investor in me (took that from a dynamic young lady -- Danya Steele), the father in me, needs to be freed. I don't believe there is anyone great who specializes in making other people comfortable.  Jesus shook the world with His audacity to claim to be the Son of God, His quest to love all. What person could be completely comfortable around Jesus.  Looking into the flames of His eyes, feeling the piercing love of His words and seeing the Peace of His soul sounds like enough to send imperfect, fallible men and women like us headed for the hills...

Who could be comfortable around Dr. King or Malcolm X? Who could be complacent around Barack Obama? Or Huey Newton, Or W.E.B. DuBois?  Who could be comfortable around the protestors of apartheid and Mandela? The slaves who dared to run towards freedom? Dorothy Height? Harriet Tubman? Ida B. Wells? Michelle Obama?  Truth be told a black man or woman that stirs up the greatness inside of others is a threat to the social order of America, it's why most of these men were either killed or censored, and why many of these women weren't celebrated until after their death.

One of the ways my HS coach got me to come back to Track & Field was that he used a spiritual truth to compel me to rethink my heinous decision to flip burgers for minimum wage rather than run track and invest in my future: "It's a sin to waste God-given talent." 

The same way I stretch before workouts and races, I'll be stretching to ready myself and my spirit for the crazy races that lie in store for me and my loved ones.  I don't apologize if my endeavors begin to make you question your own lives, that's the price you pay for being around someone dynamic.  From now on if you don't want to be challenged, lurk the corners of your nearest hood...You won't catch me there though...I'll be busy running laps around continents, infecting young people with a love of learning and life...only thing special about the education I'm serving, is that it's not for the faint at heart...be great...

Mandela Photo Courtesy of this website