Rich Dixon keeps thinking about thinking about justice:

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Our teammate Betsy invited the FREEDOM TOUR 2016 team to discuss “justice,” and shared these verses as context.

Learn to do right; seek justice.
    Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
    plead the case of the widow.

I frankly was a bit fearful about where this conversation might go. Perhaps you remember the previous year and my less-than-successful attempt to discuss justice (here & here).

Where or how did you first learn about justice?

What’s your response?

Now imagine that conversation in a circle containing people whose families fled Iran and Cuba. Whose parents survived the horrors of WWII Okinawa. A preacher’s kid whose dad was in the middle of the civil rights struggle in Chicago. A Black man raising a biracial family in Jackson, Mississippi. A police officer.

And a bunch of middle-class folks whose initial notion of injustice was parents making them go to bed too early.

How do you picture that discussion?

The author of “The Nuns on the Bus” talks about her tendency to turn away as her greatest sin. Who (or what) helped you to not turn away from a truth you didn’t want to see?

You can never anticipate a group’s response. Silly me – I figured this question would generate a discussion about human trafficking and the kids at the Home of Hope.

Turns out a few people were ready to talk about hard truths they had turned away from. Choices they weren’t especially proud of.

Of course, you and I have been there as well. It’s what makes this kind of discussion in this kind of community so remarkable. We believe we’re alone in a sinking boat, only to discover those around us are in pretty much the same boat.

And we can remind each other that, just like the disciples, “sinking” is an illusion.

Because Jesus is there. “Take courage. I Am. Don’t be afraid.”

To be continued…