Thread by @jeffblack945

RevThread # 146
Delicate

1/God’s interventions, I have learned from history, scripture, and experience, are delicate. I suppose that’s because God treasures our freedom. I think I may have spotted an intervention.

2/James Clyburn, the distinguished representative from South Carolina, gave this testimony: he was visiting a small, poor, rural African American church in the week before Super Tuesday.

3/ Every congregation has someone who is the spiritual center of the place. It’s rarely the pastor. The spiritual center is usually an elderly person, usually a female.

4/ It’s always someone who is quiet, humble, and prays much. (Sometimes, in very perceptive congregations, it’s a kid.) When these people speak, others pay attention because they can imagine God speaking to this person.

5/Rep. Clyburn, of course, understands power. As a man of faith he understands real power and fake power. So when an elderly lady sitting in that church gestured to him, he was drawn to her.

6/She looked up and asked him, “Who are you supporting? If you don’t want to say it out loud, lean down and whisper it to me.”

7/He knew that he should obey. He whispered his choice. She looked him in the face and quietly, firmly said, “You need to tell the community. The community needs to know.”

8/That’s all it took. He knew what to do and what to say. He spoke briefly, powerfully, beautifully. “We know Joe. We know Joe. More importantly, JOE KNOWS US!”

9/ A little whisper in the midst of a remote, rural African American Church. Delicate is the Lord’s intervention.

10/Here’s how powerful that moment became:
James Clyburn’s ringing endorsement shifted the African American vote, yes, and that was big. Maybe just as big, though, was this: when Joe heard Clyburn affirm that this man "KNOWS US, that released a blessing inside of Joe.

11/Joe had been sleepy, hesitant, correct but uninspired. I believe that he had no permission inside himself to fully engage in the campaign, to release his real passion and become the happy warrior. There was all the grief, it probably felt wrong for him to be happy and free..

12../ And then there was the damned creep and the whole leadership of the GOP unfairly, ridiculously, attacking his only living son. I think that too was diminishing Joe, loading him with unconscious guilt.

13/When Clyburn publicly, standing right next to Joe, said those words, he was blessing Joe, and releasing Joe’s heart for the great challenge of a campaign against the mobster who is taking down our form of government.

14/Eleven primary victories later, Joe’s confidence and energy are growing before our eyes.

15/There’s more. It’s hard to exaggerate how sensitive gifted politicians are to mood and to shifts. Amy Klobuchar was walking on the Edmund Tillis bridge that day, considering what to do, and pondering what was happening in South Carolina.

16/ As she told Savannah Guthrie, it was at that moment she knew. She saw the bridge as a place where brave people had offered to lay down their lives for the sake of a just future for our land...

17/.. The next day she stood with Joe, and with the grin of a free person doing what was hard but right, she offered her full-throated support for Joe.

18/There’s more. The brilliant young Pete Buttigieg, recently bereft of his father, came to Joe. Joe, still grieving the loss of his Beau, saw and described Pete as the gifted person Pete is; indeed, as gifted as Beau...

19/...And the man without a dad stood next to the man who had lost a son and they joined together with the irrepressible Beto in the common cause of restoring our democracy.

20/We are still free, thank God. We may choose Bernie or Donald, for freedom wouldn’t be freedom if we couldn’t. But I think it’s possible that God has decided that we have now seen where greed and lawlessness and injustice can take us.

21/And God has prompted a humble servant to hear the whisper that prompted her to give the word that started to turn us away from the madness of the last three years. May it be so.