Cindy Finley

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Archives for January 2017

January 16, 2017 By cindyfinley

By All Means Keep Moving

Growing up in the coastal South, blacks lived in pockets around town that centered in the city but stretched and weaved through suburbia. Driving through, you’d lock your doors. And God forbid your car break down when going through one of “those” neighborhoods.

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My grandmother had a woman named Annie Bell who helped her around the house. My grandmother died when I was four, but Annie Bell still came to help my Granddaddy Joe. Growing up, I remember my mom gathering our old clothes and taking them to Annie Bell for her to use or distribute among her family.

I always loved Mammy, but the love was different. Not like one person loving another because they equally value and respect the other. It’s just the way it was. 

And I didn’t question it. Not until I went to college and began to work in the Youth Department at the YMCA with a man named Skip. He was my boss and he was amazing. He was great with the kids, but even more than that, he was a great leader and a good friend.

It wasn’t that I stopped seeing that he was black, but his blackness wasn’t a focal point. He was black, and he was my friend, and I respected him.

When I started having babies, one after another, after another, my sister-in-law was trying to have babies too. Most of the time, the span of my pregnancies meant two miscarriages for Sue. It was painful, and hard, but Sue and her husband, Steve, ended up adopting five kids – three of them African American.  And you can believe that we welcomed those babies with as much delight as each one of my kids.

And up in D.C., two hours north of our town where a legacy of  “all people are created equal” coexisted with slave ownership, we arrived  with our young church. I am pretty sure we were 100% white, not by choice, but because we were white. And we stayed with our African American brothers and Filipino brothers in their homes. We spread out across the city sharing meals and sleeping on couches. And the next day we gathered together in a tent under the clear blue sky.  We were the body of Christ, worshipping, praying, and then breaking bread together. We were brothers, sisters, friends. And still are.

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And my sister and her husband, down in my hometown, welcomed a young black man into their home and into their family. They treated him as one of their own, for a time. And though his story is still being written, he’s not in this current chapter of their lives because of his choice. Not because he’s black.

I wasn’t yet born when the “Clinton 12″walked together down Broad Street from Foley Hill to Clinton High. Or when Ezell A. Blair, Jr., Franklin E. McCain, Joseph A. McNeil, and David L. Richmond sat down at the Woolworth Counter in Greensboro. And I was just a baby when police and National Guard fired on civil rights demonstrators at N. C. A&T.

I lived in the segregated South, but it wasn’t something I thought about. It just was. 

This past summer I spoke at a gathering in which I was the only white woman in the room. I had been asked to speak on the subject, “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along.” In the wake of the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Depayne Middle-Doctor, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson in the Charleston church shooting, this topic was incredibly heavy.

That morning I walked into the church – a city church with stained glass windows, a dark paneled fellowship hall, and a spread of muffins, fruit, and coffee. Reggie Edwards, a dear friend and sister greeted me with warmth and I spoke with several women who I had come to know through Reggie. We sang awhile with passion and longing, and then it was my turn.

I had a text …

“What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?” James 4:1

… but I didn’t really have a message. I shared that while I know why we can’t all get along, I don’t understand these warring passions. I don’t understand racial profiling, and segregation, and why my sister-in-law has to have different conversations with her teenage black sons than I have with my white boys.

And over the next hour, these precious women, these sisters, these friends told me story after story of their own experiences. And they even argued some about how they cope. Some choose to send their children to “white” schools for the opportunities they might have, while others choose “black” schools for their children so that they don’t feel inferior. Many of the women spoke of being pulled for a broken tail light, and the fear they have driving through a certain county and having a red truck pull up behind them. They spoke of strategies for survival and strategies for letting loved ones know their last location, should they be shot, or worse.

Encouraging Place

Hearing these beautiful women talk made me sad, but it made me angry as well. “It’s just the way it is” is not okay. How can we sit silent when our sisters are targeted for their ethnicity and have to teach their sons to keep their hands visible, not wear a hoodie, and if the police start swinging, to drop to the ground, protect their head, and curl up in a ball on their knees. How can we?

While some say advances have been made, the advances are not enough. Maybe you look at racism and think, “It’s just too big,” or “It’s not my problem.” Or maybe you think “I’m not a racist. So isn’t that enough?” And I think not. I think that you and me need to use every sphere of influence we have to advance racial equality.

So, what is your sphere of influence? Are you a writer, teacher, manager? Are you a mom in the carpool line? A cashier at Starbucks? A receptionist at a dentist office, or a hotel, or a business office? A musician, an artist, a speaker? Maybe you’re hiring manager, or an account executive, or a pastor. How can you leverage your platform? Whether your platform is in your family, your neighborhood, your church, your community … what choices can you make to move the needle, even just a little?  Because “just the way it is” is not okay. Happy birthday, Dr. King.

“If you can’t fly, run.

If you can’t run, walk.

If you can’t walk, crawl.

But by all means keep moving.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., Granville High School, April 26, 1967

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Filed Under: Impact through Christ

January 9, 2017 By cindyfinley

Learning to Honor Culture

Our family went to see Queen of Katwe last night. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.

The story is beautiful, honest, inspiring, and true.  Take a look at the trailer …

One of the things I love most about the film is that it honors culture. Not only does it depict the beauty of the land, but the heroes of the story are Africans.

Harriet Naku is a fierce mom who displays raw and determined love for her children. She fights for them, provides for them, and ultimately releases them so that they can grow and become who God created them to be.

Robert Katende climbed out of the slums of Kampala, Uganda attending university with his degree in engineering. Out of college he began working for a Christian ministry, Sports Outreach teaching soccer and chess to kids in the slums. He refuses a position as an engineer choosing to stay in ministry and invest in children who faced the same tragedies he had face. He is still working with Sports Outreach.

Phiona Mutesi lost her father to HIV/AIDS when she was only 3 and dropped out of school when she was only 6 years old because her mother could no longer pay school fees. She followed her brother to Sports Outreach where Robert Katende was teaching kids to play chess. It was there that she was introduced to the game that would change her life.

This is rare. Most of the time, the heroes of stories that make it to film are white westerners who identify a need and come in to save the day. This is changing, and its for the better. We are learning to honor culture.

Although there are plenty of books on the subject, this is one of my favorites:

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With RiverCross, we are working hard to grow a ministry that honors culture. This week we are laying the groundwork for a project that embodies this value.

Kathy Buchanan and Marshal Younger are coming to town to dream about an audio drama, like Adventures in Odyssey. But instead of Whit being the fount of wisdom, an African woman will be the one to shine light and show beauty. Instead of Eugene, Connie, and all the rest, the children will be street kids, and orphans, children impacted by war… And while we won’t shy away from the brutal realities, we will address the realities through a lens of hope.

Learning to honor culture. I’m not going to pretend that we’re doing this perfectly, but we’re trying.

So have you seen Queen of Katwe? What did you think? And what do you think the Bible has to do say about honoring culture? And how are you learning to honor culture?

Filed Under: Uncategorized

January 2, 2017 By cindyfinley

What If We Went After Weightiness?

It’s that time of year when we’re talking resolutions, and goals, and words for the year. We’re talking boldness, and bravery, and brand new as we usher 2016 out the door and welcome 2017.

And the most common resolution is no surprise. Lose weight. Gym memberships soar. According to Gold’s Gym, their traffic jumps 40% between December and February. And everyone’s tossing out the cookies and buying kale.

avocado-kale-orange-leno-blueberry-smoothie

But what if we turned this resolution on its head and went after weightiness this year?

For this light momentary affliction is producing in us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:17-18)

What if we went after weightiness? 

I’m not making light of real life struggles, pain, fear. They are real. Right now I have one friend who is facing a likely diagnosis of a debilitating and eventually fatal disease. Another whose choice to follow God is bringing intense financial stress. Another whose empty womb is a constant ache.

Life is laced with ache.

A weightless approach

brushes over the ache,

buries the pain, and

sometimes boasts in the strength to manage whatever it is.

But all of this brushing and burying and boasting is about as effective as a dusty gym bag and rotting kale.  

Let’s trade common resolutions for uncommon grace and go after weightiness.

Assess the reality. Call it what it is. Don’t minimize, and don’t make it more than it is. Assess the reality.

Don’t withdraw. Pain makes us want to go inward, pull back. Resist that temptation and trust in a friend, or two, or three. Don’t withdraw.

Look beyond. And while there are many things I think would be worse than death, even a lifetime of affliction is a parenthetical clause in the book of life.  Look beyond.

Trust God. He really does love you. And his plans really are for good. And he, alone, can take the brutality of the now and infuse it with the fullness of the not yet. These are not trite phrases but bedrock truths that you can count on in your deepest pain. Trust God.

What could 2017 be like if instead of resolving to lose weight, we chose to go after weightiness?

 

 

Filed Under: Intimacy with Christ

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