Turn and Face It

Not too long ago, I heard Dr. Reggie Williams offer a profound analogy for our times. He talked about swimming in above-ground pools as a child. One of his favorite things to do was to walk around the pool and get the water to flow in one direction. If he did this with his friends, it created a powerful tidepool. Then for fun, he would switch directions and walk the other way. Obviously, the water would now push against him, and going that direction felt incredibly tough.

He offered the illustration as what we find happening when we stand against the cultural flow happening around us right now, especially in the collective church. So many people are walking in the same direction that a powerful current pulls us along. As Dr. Williams explains:

You don't have to intentionally be walking the tide pool to be moving along with the waves. It is only when you recognize that you are being carried by this ideology and you turn and face it that you stand in opposition to it. But if you try and do it by yourself, you're gonna drown.

We have very prominent voices and leaders who have established a movement of the "water" around us. And while they are certainly problematic, the bigger issue I see is how many people seem content to stop walking and be carried by the current. There's often plausible deniability involved, especially since they aren't taking any steps in that direction themselves. But if everyone does this, we all end up going that direction. As Dr. Martin Luther King observed, "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

It's not enough for a few people to walk the other direction while the majority floats along in anticipation. Those few will drown in this process, and the current will continue. The philosopher Hannah Arendt said it even more strongly: "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil." Moving along with the current is itself an evil.

Rather than expect the leaders walking forward to suddenly change direction, it seems far more likely that we could invite those who are being carried by the flow of others to have the courage to turn around and join those who desperately need them. Only with enough of us together can we begin to create a counter-current that sets its own ripple effects in motion.

The flow around you might be benefiting you, or at least not harming you directly (at least in ways you can perceive). But if we look around us, we see it destroying more and more people. The dehumanization of our time is the stuff future generations will study and read about in museums.

It's not enough to applaud ourselves for not pushing the current forward.

We must be willing to actively produce a better current. But turning around doesn’t just feel hard. It is hard. It costs friendships that once felt effortless. It costs the comfort of fitting in. It costs the safety of being assumed "one of us." For some, it costs a job. For others, it costs a church. For many, it costs family peace.

The current isn’t powerful because it’s right. It’s powerful because it makes disobedience expensive.

The problem isn’t that people don’t see what’s happening. The problem is that most people can’t afford to see it alone. We don’t need more lone swimmers fighting the current until they collapse. We need enough bodies moving together that the water itself begins to change direction.

Every single week, I talk with people who are pleasantly surprised to find more people speaking out and calling out the craziness around us. Almost every single time, they tell me how alone they have felt in this journey. The greatest gift I can offer them (and to you, dear friend) is the reminder that you are not actually alone. I believe more and more people are realizing what is happening, and I'm watching as more of them decide to switch directions and walk the other way.

As Howard Thurman observed, “Community cannot for long feed on itself; it can only flourish with the coming of others from beyond, their unknown and undiscovered brothers and sisters.”

We desperately need a better current.

Photo by Ryan Waldman on Unsplash