Don’t you see? We were created to be so much more than we can ever think or imagine. So much more than the world tells us. Can money help? Yes, if used with the right direction. Can fame help? Absolutely, if used with the right discretion. Money and fame are not evil; it is the motives of the heart once it is received. The Bible aptly warns us, “Pride goes before the fall.” You don’t have pride if you know the source of your money and fame. It is when the money and fame are attributed to the person not the source of the person.
T.S. Eliot
Your money helped to make my homegoing appropriate for this side of heaven even though I had long been received on the other side. Christ doesn’t care about pomp and circumstance. If He did, then He wouldn’t have died on a cross. He was and is the King yet He died a lowly death. This proves what He came for and why Harvest of Hope Africa and Deedra Shilliday Ministries do what they do. Jesus came to seek and save the lost. He sought out the most vulnerable and He cared for them. That is what we are all called to do. You don’t have to come to Africa, but you are always welcome! Reach your neighbors, your coworkers, your friends. Jesus is Alive and He wants to change lives just like He changed mine. Even if it was for a short time, my life mattered. All lives matter!
Mama Irene took me to the hospital because I haven’t been breathing and eating quite right. While I have wanted to go to the capital city, this was not my plan to get there. Oh, but it was nice to spend quality time alone with just her. She is the best!
The doctors are puzzled by my case. It may be a reaction to the formula so they suggested I try camel, rice, or oat milk. I know this isn’t going to be easy to find. I hate that it will be an extra expense, but everyone says they will do whatever it takes to get me healthy.
Once Darius Philip came to the house they seemed to increase in their concern for me. I think it’s because I can’t stand or lift my head like him even though I am older. My legs look fine but I just am too weak. I think I am lacking the nutrients I need because I can’t keep the formula down.
My friends in the states are planning to bring me soy formula to see if that will work. They are coming in March and I can’t wait to see them! Until then I am doing my therapy exercises with the house moms. Everyone at Under His Wings Babies Home loves me so much!
Her name is mentioned all the time around here. “When is Deedra coming?” “I really miss Deedra.” “Has Deedra messaged lately?” All this talk about her, and you would have thought someone would have told me she was white! As you can see, I didn’t mind. I could tell she loved me even before we formally met. To be fair, she loves all the HOHA children and staff. As I said before, we are a family.
But, I like to think I am special. Can you keep a secret? She told me so herself!
I love my big family. From the house moms to the older girls, everyone takes such good care of me. Grace is one of my favorites! In 2017, she was abandoned along with her sisters, Faith and Nduko. She was a little over a year old and was very sick. Grace is a miracle like me and when she smiles it lights up the room. I haven’t learned to smile yet but I keep trying. I know how blessed I am to be a part of the Harvest of Hope Africa family.
Today I met Mama Irene. She will nurture and love me as she does all the children at Under His Wings Babies Home. She wanted to take me home, but the hospital said I needed to stay a few more days.
October 15, 2022
Today is the day! I am preparing to go home. Mama Irene and the social worker are packing all my supplies and getting me ready to meet my new family.
I can’t wait to see my 50 new playmates!
October 21, 2022
I am getting stronger every day! Look at my big brown eyes!
Pole! Pole! Pole! Those are the first words I ever heard. The rescuer was saying sorry because I had been discarded many hours ago. Yet, I had breath in my lungs and the capacity to cry out until I was found.
It was truly miraculous!
A miracle that I was found before being eaten by an animal.
A miracle that I didn’t die from an infection due to the dried grass and dirt around my umbilical cord.
A miracle that I didn’t freeze to death in the cool morning hours.
A miracle that my weak little voice was heard by a passerby.
We all know the adage: Try to walk a mile in another’s shoes. But, have we taken that to heart? Have we put ourselves in the place of another? Even tried to imagine for a moment what it might be like to even literally walk down the street in a Black person’s shoes?
I admit that it takes energy to put ourselves in another’s place. Mentally, we have to expend the time to ask questions. Physically, we have to make the effort to form relationships with those of another race. Emotionally, we have to process what they tell us.
This is difficult and so we don’t do it. We rationalize that we are not racist because we would never mistreat someone of another race.
I would agree with some of my closest friends and family –you would never mistreat a black person.
But what are you doing to understand the plight of what African Americans are facing in our country when it comes to injustice?
Let me be clear. I am Pro-Police. I am anti-Black Lives Matter organization.
With that clarity, I say to those who say they are the same, please open yourselves to go beyond your current thinking because what happened to Jonathan Price in Wolf City, Texas this week happens all the time.
This is why frustration turned to anger turns to riots. I want you to understand how it gets to this instead of pouring more misunderstanding on the issue of race in America.
Of course, riots aren’t the solution. But, more than the physical damage, they have caused White people to throw the baby out with the bath water. We cannot dismiss the race problem because of the actions of a few. There are radical people on both sides.
I am not calling out radicals. I am calling out you. The one who smiles at a Black person in the restaurant but has no friends of another race. The one who thinks the Hispanic girl in your child’s class is so cute but never invites her over for a playdate.
I can hear the rationalization from my friends now. Yes, I mean people that are more than acquaintances. So, I am going to give you a plumb-line:
It is Memorial Day and you are having a party. You invite your friends and family. How many people of another race are at your party?
If the answer is none. You are part of the race problem in America.
You are perpetuating it by modeling it to your children. I know that hurts. It pricks because it’s true.
What if that was your daughter? Would you want a Black man to stand by and let someone beat on her? I know that the people I am talking to wouldn’t hesitate to stop a fight of any man of any color beating on a woman regardless of her race. And, you would agree with me that Jonathan Price was a good man and did the right thing. Herein lies the race problem: he shouldn’t have to think twice about doing it. His family shouldn’t have to be grieving because he was Black.
If that still sits with you wrong, that’s why I wrote this. I have had to grapple with this and accepted that I need to become part of the solution because racism in America is a problem!
There’s another adage: If the shoe fits, wear it.
I hope today that you will recognize that shoe doesn’t fit anymore. Take it off and walk a mile in another’s. It will cost you time and emotional energy. It may even cost you “friends” but your life will be richer and America will be better.
It is clear from what Jonathan Price posted on Facebook that he was trying to walk a mile too:
“There were times I should have been detained for speeding, outstanding citations, outdated registration, dozing off at a red light before making it to my garage downtown Dallas after a lonnng night out,” Price said. “I’ve passed a sobriety test after leaving a bar in Wylie, Texas by 2 white cops and still let me drive to where I was headed, and by the way they consider Wylie, Texas to be VERY racist. I’ve never got that kind of ENERGY from the po-po.”
“Not saying black lives don’t matter, but don’t forget about your own, or your experiences through growth / ‘waking up,’”.
From history we learn that Harriet Beecher Stowe was a small, unassuming woman. Many have thought this of me and then the idiom “Don’t judge a book by its cover” played in their head. If you’ve read the first three parts of this blog Becoming Aware, you understand where my fierceness was flamed. If you’ve heard me speak, you know that Christ is the source of my passion. Likewise, the Lord was the inspiration for Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She was the daughter of a preacher and no stranger to pain and loss. As a young mother, her son died from cholera; a tragedy that helped her understand the plight of slave mothers when their children were taken from them.
Most certainly, she had witnessed plenty of runaways while living in Cincinnati directly across the Ohio River from Kentucky, a slave state. Using her talents and the inspiration of the Word of God, she wrote a novel about her firsthand knowledge and interaction with abolitionist papers. Although it was first published as a paper, it soon became a book and sold 300,000 copies within a year. Why so popular? She captured the points of view of all involved. From the unsaved slave to the Bible-believing, well-intentioned slave owner and from the self-righteous abolitionist to the black Christian, each one had a perspective and that perspective was his or her reality. And, I believe being led by the Holy Spirit, Harriet Beecher Stowe was able to thread all of those perspectives together to show how the system of slavery was unjust.
Ahmaud Arbery had a perspective. Ahmaud’s mother, Wanda Cooper, has a perspective. Ahmaud’s shooters, Gregory McMichael and his sonTravis have perspectives. One of the original prosecutors has a perspective. The police chief has a perspective. If you add all those perspectives together, the common denominator is that racism is unjust.
It has been 170 years since the Fugitive Slave Act and we still have people hunting down others created in the image of God because of the color of their skin.
In Gen. 1:26-27, God said:
Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” He made humankind in the Trinity’s image and likeness.
God, the creator of the universe, patterned every human after His personality and receptivity while we remain inferior to His precise nature. He doesn’t need us, but He chose us to be His representatives. Every generation after Adam and Eve are created imago Dei.
A proper understanding of creation, a vertical relationship toward God and a horizontal relationship toward others, empowers us to follow the greatest commandment: “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30).
When a person loves God completely, unconditional love overflows into loving one’s neighbor.
God’s perspective becomes our perspective.
He asks each of us on behalf of each other: “What do I require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).
I vividly remember the night I became aware of the Klu Klux Klan. As a third grader, I was up late watching the news when the horrific images of current events flashed on the screen. By this time in my young life I was living in the projects and well aware of the danger this could pose to my neighbors. But, in my young mind, it was going to happen to me.
Two years earlier, I would have never thought this. I would have felt saddened by the news report for “those people” but it wouldn’t have made me lose sleep like I did that night. It wasn’t long after I moved to the projects that I became aware of my mother’s race. Sitting in a reading group with students I barely knew, a boy (I can’t even recall his name or face) started hurling racial slurs toward me about being Chinese. Little did he know I was Korean; little did I know that my mother looked different than others. His remarks stung. I denied them. As the new girl learning to fight to survive not so much the school but the new neighborhood, I was ready to combat his attacks. But more than that, as a person who was noticeably different, at least by my mother’s appearance, I felt singled out. He put me on display and the teacher did nothing to protect me.
I was so disgusted by his ignorance and the teacher’s lack of empathy that I acted like I was physically sick to go home early. Emotionally, I was sick. Walking home alone in the middle of the day, I kept asking myself how I never noticed my mother’s appearance. I was well aware that our single-parent family was different than some of my school friends who had fathers and lived in actual houses instead of a small apartment above a printing press, but I never realized she looked different.
Though I was cognizant of my social and familial status at my previous school, no one ever called me out for not being like them. Mind you, this was still in the city and there was diversity yet I lived unaware. Even growing up in bars and sleeping in corners of parties where no child should be, I didn’t see my mother’s race. I didn’t become aware until I was treated differently because of it.
Deedra’s mother at the most contented time of her tormented life.
You’re Korean? Most of you are as surprised as I was to learn that! Many people are because my sister was the one blessed with my mother’s physical attributes. As a matter of fact, I can vividly recall the day she came home from school ranting about her 6th grade class picture. Aside from being a tween (a word not yet invented), I couldn’t understand her disgust. It was beautiful as far a school photos go. She didn’t like it because her friends said she looked Chinese. By this time in my life, as a college freshmen majoring in Elementary/Special Education, I encouraged her to embrace her uniqueness. She didn’t look like anything but who she was designed to be.
The awareness of eternal value regardless of external differences had been a journey for me, and I was pained to know that she would have to learn that for herself. My path to discovery began the day I sat across from the boy stretching the corners of his eyes to make fun of my ethnicity.
It’s ironic that living in the projects taught me to see race and to ignore it. From my best friend to my boyfriend, Jimmy Mac, and from my drug suppliers to those I drug around to stake my territory, they all looked different from me. But, I wasn’t aware.
There’s a saying that becomes clearer as you age: “You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.” That could have applied to my new situation, but for me, the adage became “you don’t know who they were until they’re gone.” You see, due to the my mother’s limited ability to care for us and the ever-increasing danger of the community, we relocated to be closer to the only relatives we had. I moved into the projects afraid and I left the security of that insecurity resilient. Once again, moving to an income-based apartment complex, I was ready to become queen of the mountain. However, I quickly realized the communal setting was not what I was used to. We weren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.
No, wait. I think this is far more like Kansas than I’ve been used to.
As a ten-year-old, diversity became crystal clear to me when there wasn’t any.
