When video first emerged of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the back of George Floyd’s neck until he died, I said both in print (see my June 7, 2020, column, “The Line Between Riots and Righteousness”) and from the pulpit that it was murder, and I stand by that evaluation. A jury has now determined that to be the case, though what will happen on appeal, especially given Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ foolish and incendiary rhetoric and other pressures on the jury aforetime is anyone’s guess.
But within minutes of that verdict, a different sort of scene played out in Columbus, Ohio. It was there that a 16-year-old girl named Ma’Khia Bryant was shot and killed by police in order to protect a different young girl she was attacking with a knife. In that case, the officer did exactly what reasonable people would expect him to do, and though any loss of life is a tragedy, this one was utterly justifiable. Because of his heroic actions, the girl at the point of the knife got to go home safely that day, and any loving parent whose child was in that exact same place would hug their child tight and thank God for another day with him or her.
In a touch of utterly heartbreaking irony, just a few hours after that in Cincinnati, Ohio, a 13-year-old girl attacked another 13-year-old girl with a knife. There were no police to intervene, and thus it was that 13-year-old Nyaira Givens lost her life. While the digital ink was still dripping on activist Bree Newsome’s tweet justifying and downplaying such situations (“Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons. We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon against one of the teenagers. Y’all need help. I mean that sincerely.”) a girl was losing her life to that same type of situation. Reading the heartbreaking words of the little girl’s father – “I held her. I watched her as she died. I watched her, you know. All I could do was just hold her, hold her” – is world-shattering. (https://www.wlwt.com/article/family-devastated-after-13-year-old-stabbed-by-former-friend-during-fight-dies/36180426#)
But while activists agitate for their particular point of view in all of this, I saw something play out at my church Sunday that could and should be the change agent for all of it.
Scene one began during a time of testimonies when a father of three young children stood and said, “If you had told me five months ago I would be standing here in church with my family praising God, I would have called you a liar. I was a bad man, hooked on drugs, but God changed everything.”