Sunday in the Zoo

Sunday Afternoon at the Zoo

This summer I took a Sabbatical from teaching Sunday school. Matt and I used our open-ended weekends to travel some more and get to know some other people in Greenville. We started teaching again last week, and I’ve been apprehensive about taking on the responsibility and commitment again. Additionally, we began using a new curriculum that is completely different from what I’d been using for the past four and a half years. Instead of teaching a story and a verse and singing songs, I have a series of five to six activities that lead up to the children’s church lesson that follows. The past two weeks of Sunday school have been a delightful learning experience for me! I hope my little five-year olds are getting as much from the lesson as I am. Yesterday we focused on the creation of man and how we are made in God’s image.

Matt had been sick and I knew from experience that the best way to get him feeling normal again would be to get him outside. He and a friend had talked about going to the zoo, so he asked him if he’d want to try to go to the Columbia zoo for a couple hours. We could not have asked for better weather for a car ride and the zoo. The sky was that vivid primary blue that marks the end of the white heat and the beginning of the cool fall. The air has lost it’s humidity but it’s still mild enough for short sleeves, flirty skirts and sandals.

I’ve been to the zoo many times in my life, but between the weather, the significance of Sunday and the Sunday school lesson I was struck with new thoughts. We were standing in the exotic bird display, and I couldn’t tear my gaze away from some beautiful blue parrots. I wanted to take a picture, but there was no way to do that without catching the wire mesh separating me from them. With the account of creation still fresh in my mind, I began to think on what it would be like if we could be that close to breathtakingly beautiful birds without a cage containing them. How sad that sin has put so many barriers in our lives. The friend who was with us has made some imperfect decisions recently and hurt us and others. Respecting his privacy, we’ve never questioned his behavior; but I have a list of questions in my diary that I would like to ask. I will never know why he was so rude to me all in the name of "teasing." I’ll never know why he broke my best friend’s heart. I’ll never know why he completely disappeared for four month in spite of the hours Matt had invested in their friendship. And, I’ll never get to experience blue parrots without constraints.

I’m slowly realizing that this is yet the consequences of my sin. And God’s grace is greater than all of it. Closure is waiting us in heaven. On this side of paradise, I will content myself with birds in cages and unanswered questions.

OP ED - Other People's Noses

Early this morning, I read an article on CNN.com about how Donald Trump had offered to buy the land that is the potential future site of the hotly contested 9/11 Mosque. But what truly caught my attention were the comments (this was early enough that there was a manageable amount of them). The first comment actually pertained to the article at hand (the author felt that Mr. Trump was trying to buy off people’s morals), but the remaining comments quickly disintegrated into flagrant statements about the rightness or wrongness, as judged by the constitution, of building the mosque and whether all Muslims could be equated with those who carried out the terrorist attacks or whether that was an extremist group of Muslims. And I realized they all had missed the point.

There is an adage that says “your freedom ends where my nose begins.” The implication being that, we all have a right to liberty, but we also should not encroach upon the liberty of others. In a physical realm, we demonstrate this all the time. If I buy a bus ticket, I have a right to sit on any seat in that bus; however, if someone is already seated, I waive my right to that particular seat—I do not sit on top of them, and I do flippantly not ask them to move. The reality is that sometimes our freedoms overlap. A civilized society compensates for this through graciousness and selflessness.

Mr. Elzanaty and the other owners of Park51 have an unequivocal right to build a Mosque at that site. They own the property and the zoning laws are such that their proposed plans are in line with them. Freedom of religion is culturally accepted in the United States, so there are no laws barring their building a place of worship for their religion. And yet there are noses in the way. These are the noses of the family and friends of those who died in the 2001 terrorist attacks. These are also the noses of Americans who think it’s distasteful or dangerous to build an ostentatious Islamic building in proximity to the primary site of those terrorist attacks, lest it be viewed as celebratory gloating or a challenge.

Americans have, since their founding, accepted that men have a right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” These rights were violated in the September 11^th Attacks. And many Americans argue these foundational rights are again being violated in the building of a Mosque near the site of those attacks.

The “non-extremist” Muslims protest that theirs is a religion of peace and of love toward fellow man. Mr. Elzanaty has been offered an opportunity by Mr. Trump (and according to the article, several others) to withdraw, with no financial loss to him, from the volatile situation and defer to other people’s noses. In refusing, he is not practicing the Islam that his Mosque is alleged to support.