On a whim…

I remember a reckoning.

It was the kind of afternoon that should have been filled with the sounds of play, but instead it was filled with the smell of gasoline and the realization of a terrible mistake. Several children had been playing—mixing fire and fuel. When I first heard the cries, my mind, seeking refuge in abstraction, thought, They really shouldn’t do that; people will think they are hurt.

But when I crossed the yard, the abstraction vanished.

I found a child smoldering. Small flames still flickered at his skin. I could see the white of his bone. He was entering shock, and in that clinical stillness I knew that shock—not the fire—would kill him if I didn’t anchor him to the world.

In that moment, I did not ask whose fault it was.

I did not wave a finger at a boy whose flesh was charred to lecture him on the dangers of fire.

I did not demand proof of his standing before deciding whether he deserved help.

I sat in the dirt. I looked him in the eye. And I asked him if he played baseball.

For fifteen minutes, we didn’t talk about fire. We talked about life on third base. We talked about the velocity of a well-hit ball. We talked about anything that would keep his heart beating until help arrived.

The Second Crime

I have been thinking about that boy lately as I watch our systems of enforcement—particularly when the law is applied with speed but without mercy.

I believe in the law. But I also believe a profound truth: justice without mercy is another kind of crime.

When families are left smoldering under the weight of systems they did not fully understand, or when individuals are crushed by rigid bureaucracy in the name of order, our first instinct must not be to wave a finger.

The Roman jurists had a name for this failure: Summum ius, summa iniuria—the extreme application of law that becomes the greatest injustice. The second crime is not the violation itself, but the refusal to see the human being burning in front of us.

The Call of the Witness

As an ordained minister, I find myself in a predicament. If I do not speak about this injustice, I am complicit. If I do speak, I know some who currently listen to me may choose to walk away.

But I remember the boy in the yard.

If I could sit in the dirt with a child who had broken the rules and choose his life over his guilt, how can I remain silent now?

Our job is not to stand over the suffering and demand to see their papers.

Our job is to sit in the dust, recognize the humanity being charred, and talk—steadily, patiently—about the velocity of a life worth saving.