MRS. SOUTHERN LOVES YOU

As the pandemic hit the world I thought of my people in both worlds. The world is full of poverty, and yet it isn’t that poverty is only found in desperate financial straits. As poor as a little boy or girl is who is being abused, the poorest by far is the person abusing them. I wonder how to help the depressed, the addicted, the anxious, the mentally ill, the tired, the distressed, the divorced, the ill, the self-harmers… you know, the ones that can’t just “snap out of it.” It’s not just a bad mood, just as the conditions for poverty do not happen overnight. I used to think people could just snap out of things. Sometimes they can, but most often they have to climb out, fingernail by fingernail filled with dirt. 

Life is complicated and simple. It’s as complicated as the millions of details of a dozen generations before us, and as simple as that moment when we’ve made up our mind and the mountain moves. It’s the strength inside our weaknesses, the weaknesses inside our strengths. 

It’s as simple as the things we believe, and as complicated as the things we believe. Take the atom, it’s a building block of the universe, and what a universe! It’s intricate. So are you. So am I. And yet at our smallest we too, are made up of the building blocks of what we believe. Mutated, our beliefs become cancer in ourselves. I’ve felt this cancer in my soul. It’s hungry, it’s savage. It convinces people they are worthless. It convinces them they are invincible. It convinces us we are alone. It convinces us that we can save ourselves. It calls us to wrap garments of success and beauty and muscle and status and sports and education and money and relationships around ourselves because we are naked, shivering creatures hiding from a Creator. But he calls us out from the bushes. 

On this glorious spring day, laying on the citrusy beach towel outside of a bank in small town NC reading about a farm-to-table experiment by journalists, the sound of horns and hullabaloo caught my attention. It was confusing. Was it a parade - kids out skylarking? As the cars kept coming, tatters of the messages written on the cars became visible, team colors streamed, people cheered, and it began to dawn on me. 

 It was a collection of teachers out in the neighborhoods of their kids with messages written on their cars. “We miss you.” “Go team!” The schools had been shut down for about a week and a half, a whole world removed from a social community. There was even a fire engine, and the cars just kept coming, and coming. I couldn’t remember what most of the cars said, but engraved in my mind was the memory of those teachers out in their cars, driving around to say hi to their students, telling them a little of something in the world was ok… showing their faces.

I found myself whispering, “it’s going to be ok. We’re going to be ok.” I hadn’t even been as worried as half the world around me, but in that moment something released in me. I saw that my fears had the same undercurrent everyone else’s had, even if I had more resources with which to answer its questions. Even if… 

One of the final cars pulls around and in the back window was written: 

“Mrs. Southern Loves You.” 

I reach up to touch my face. It is wet with salt water.

The fears of the world were mine.