Healing our Community

Healing Our Community by Chris Brazelton

As a child, I came across a poem that profoundly impacted me. I was thinking about sharing it here, and then there was a moment at Sunday services when I knew it was the right time. The sermon was on healing, not only physical healing but emotional and spiritual healing.

We heal our communities by healing our splintered relationships. We in the U.S. have become increasingly divided by politics, race, and religion, and this division is hurting more than helping us address our country’s challenges. I’ve heard some say that we are headed towards another civil war, even as they are throwing verbal gasoline on the embers.

If we are to remain UNITED as states, and as people, we must find the connections I know exist. We are far more similar than we are different. We can work not to let the differences destroy us. Start by reaching out to those we see as different and find those similarities. Find the common goals and values.  Then we have hope.  The poem reminds me of what happens when we fail.  I share the poem here:

The Cold Within by James Patrick Kinney

Six humans trapped by happenstance
In bleak and bitter cold.
Each one possessed a stick of wood
Or so the story’s told.

Their dying fire in need of logs
The first man held his back
For of the faces round the fire
He noticed one was black.

The next man looking ‘cross the way
Saw one not of his church
And couldn’t bring himself to give
The fire his stick of birch.

The third one sat in tattered clothes.
He gave his coat a hitch.
Why should his log be put to use
To warm the idle rich?

The rich man just sat back and thought
Of the wealth he had in store
And how to keep what he had earned
From the lazy shiftless poor.

The black man’s face bespoke revenge
As the fire passed from his sight.
For all he saw in his stick of wood
Was a chance to spite the white.

The last man of this forlorn group
Did nought except for gain.
Giving only to those who gave
Was how he played the game.

Their logs held tight in death’s still hands
Was proof of human sin.
They didn’t die from the cold without
They died from the cold within.