I Want to be a Victor Kind of Human.

There's this thought I just can't get out of my head this weekend:

I want to be the Weston's friend, Victor, kind of Christian. Kind of human.

Victor. The fifth-grade boy from Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis whose knee-jerk reaction was to shield his friend ,Weston, from the bullets when evil stormed into their chapel service, locked and loaded.

There are so many different ideas of what a Christian is like...and that's the one I want to identify with. Victor.

It kind of brings me back to when I first learned about Jim Elliot, who was martyred while making friendly contact with a tribe in the Amazon. He had refused to bring bullets with him because he did not want to be in a position where he might hurt the very people, he had come to share Jesus with. That story shaped me. As did the story of Desmond Doss, the conscientious objector who won the congressional medal of honor for all the lives he saved at the Battle of Okinawa.

I think about Shane Claiborne, who among many, many, many other holy crazy things he's done, was arrested for sleeping on the streets of New York in order to bring attention to the injustice of criminalizing homelessness. I think about Bob Goff, Katie Davis Majors, Fred Rogers. Corrie Ten Boone. I want to be a Christian like that kind.

I also think of a story my friend told me this week. Of kneeling at the alter recently to talk to God, because she was grieving, mourning disappointments and rejection. And the women who rushed to her side. These ladies didn't necessarily share her political affiliation or every single one of her views. They'd certainly never lived her same experiences. But they came. And one even made her way from the back of the balcony, down the stairs and to the front of the church. Because much like Jesus, their empathy compelled them to sit and feel and lament alongside her. And then to speak to the Father on her behalf. 

I want to link arms with those so faithfully following the guy who died with the words, "Father forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing" still on his lips. Who said things like "greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." While worldly leaders call for war and vengeance against our enemies, he calls us to lay down our swords and also lets us know that if a Roman soldier comes along and insists that we carry HIS armor for a mile, we should offer to go two. 

I want to be the kind of person whose life is so shaped by the Red Letters of Jesus, that if put to the test, I act justly in ways that look like muscle memory.

But guess what? I can't do it on my own. And neither can Shane Claiborne and neither could Fred Rogers or Corrie Tin Boone. It's too hard. It's too painful. I need the paraclete...the helper...the Holy Spirit.

Because we're so awfully human. I can be emotionally needy, or passive aggressive, and sometimes I forget to do box breathing when I'm triggered and my cerebral cortex shuts down and I go all limbic and start telling people how I really feel. Or replying to the comments section on Facebook. I'm pampered and fussy and I can get really whiney when I'm cold, tired and hungry.

Not to mention this world feels so dark. Hopeless is the word I've been hearing (and using) more lately. Three kids committed suicide at my son's high school in the last month. There were eight school shootings in the last 13 days. The grown-ups don't seem to be in charge or following the rules when it comes to running countries. A man was brutally murdered in front of a live audience of over 3,000, which just seemed to make us square up more. A Ukrainian refugee was killed on a train in North Carolina and the parts of the story we're focused on aren't helpful for anyone. All this as we marked the passing of 24 years since 9/11. 

But I'm reminded that my particular type of Christian is supposed to be known for being "prisoners of hope". Audaciously, and ridiculously optimistic. And that it was never supposed to be this way with the meanness and murdering.  And someday it won't be. But in the meantime, we're participants in that change, as "ordinary radicals" who are "doing "small things with great love" (Mother Teresa).

Lord, Forgive us. Help us. Amen.