Running Red

Kyle is just on the skinny side of fifteen, all kindness and a quick smile. He blazes intensity, beautifully lost within whatever story we’re reading; he’s the type who can’t help but yell at any movie screen. And his cheeks splotch not pink but gosh-darn red when someone praises him, when I ask him a question, when he laughs.

So today when he told me what happened, the tops of my ears burned gosh-darn red with anger. It wasn’t teenage bullies but adults who ripped everything he loved away in a moment, with no explanation that I could understand. And I play the onlooker, every time: powerless. My job is to watch their faces crumble, to shake my helpless fist on their behalf.

I preached to him resiliency. “This is not over. You are going to do everything you can to get this back next year, and in the meantime, you are not going to give up, you hear me? You have the opportunity the other kids don’t have: to overcome one more obstacle, to hold onto hope and not let your emotions go in spite of this.”

He squared his jaw and nodded slowly. His cheeks glowed, and so did his eyes. Yes. He was on board. He was still sad, but his soul was ten times bigger than the back-row boys ever could have guessed when he marched out of the room to grapple with the whole mean world again.

And just as Kyle left me, someone stepped on my own heart. Just a little bit— but maybe it hurt so much this time because of the pattern, the constant dripping that’s added up. I let myself stew, gnash against the injustice, consider reciprocating just this once. I read Psalm 37, and then I doubted it, and I sang with Jon Foreman, “Will justice ever find you? Do the wicked never lose?” This I cannot, will not ever understand: how people can spit such meanness for no discernible reason, how the sky itself can bend against the sweetest child.

But Kyle and I are not like them, and we will not be like them.

This is the difference: we know how to overcome, how to cry and then keep singing courage in the face of every closed door. We will feel the bitterness starting to crust over our hearts, the cynicism smoking out the fire in our eyes— and then we will beat our own hearts soft again until we find the mercy that makes us strong. We are going to keep running, and they cannot catch us, they cannot catch us, they cannot catch our blazing red.