Quiet faith amidst the shouting powerful

My theology of resistance

Hello friends. I’ve been working on this essay in earnest since March, and as it has grown it’s taken in most of my various influences and culminated in a sort or personal theology of resistance. It is wrestling in real time with faith, calamity, and power. I hope it can be helpful.

It is far too long to submit to an online publication, so I humbly submit it to you. Thanks for following along all these years.

Lieve Verschuier - Staartster (komeet) boven Rotterdam - 11028-A-B - Museum Rotterdam

I was sixteen and lying in my bunk at church camp. All the adults were out of the building, deliberating on who would win the coveted camp prize: a scholarship to the local Bible college. The older guys, the ones everyone looked up to, were in the middle of the room, whipping each other with towels.

Soon, a crowd of campers surrounded them and began volunteering to get whipped—to prove how tough they were. But then guys started to get called out, one by one. Eventually, attention landed on a guy named Jackson. He was lying in his bunk like me, trying not to pay attention to the bravado in the middle of the room.

He was different from the guys with the towels. He was gentler, quieter. His body hadn’t grown into itself, and he spoke softly—hardly the virile way some of our preachers modeled from stage.

The group of guys started chanting his name.

“Jack-son. Jack-son. Jack-son.”

He climbed out of his bed, in only his boxers, and made his way to the middle of the ring. The loudest of the older guys began whipping him. The crowd loved it. Over and over and over again. Jackson’s back became bloodied and swollen. I remember that. I also remember—I don’t think I’ll ever forget—the look of determination on Jackson’s face. It was defiance and surrender and pain and anger. I felt terrible for what was happening, but I remained silent.

Finally, the whipping stopped, and that ever-wandering eye of masculinity moved on to other things.

—

At the climactic moment of Kendrick Lamar’s first full LP, Good Kid, m.A.A.d city, an elderly neighbor, voiced by Maya Angelou, sees Kendrick and friends holding guns and calls them over.

“‘Why are you so angry?
See, you young men are dying of thirst.
Do you know what that means?
That means you need water, holy water.
You need to be baptized with the Spirit of the Lord.
Do you want to receive God as your personal savior?'"

-Kendrick Lamar¹

She then leads the young men through the Sinner’s Prayer, culminating in Kendrick’s salvation. He becomes a new man, and the song closes with this reminder from Ms. Angelou:

“Alright now, remember this day / The start of a new life, your real life.”²

—

Last spring, I visited my best friend Rob in Los Angeles. I slept with the windows open because it was March and Los Angeles was, for once, raining. I woke in the middle of the night—somewhere around two-thirty—and laid there in the silence, listening for nothing in particular. Suddenly, I heard a whistle in the air above me. It took me a second, but I matched the sound to a memory. I heard that whistle before in war movies. The whistle of a bomb. Something inside me innately knew it to be true. Then, the explosion. It was loud, and it was close. I ran to Rob’s room and opened the door to see him sitting up in bed. “I heard it too,” he said. We both looked at each other in silence, listening for anything, for everything.

Seconds went by. I expected to hear screams or another explosion. I didn’t, though. Just silence.

Turns out, it was a firework.

I called my mom the next morning and told her about it, laughing. I felt so dumb, mistaking a firework for a bomb. But deep inside, in the place that innately knew that sound, I still felt afraid.

The world we live in feels perilous enough for a bomb in Los Angeles. I know it to be true. Don’t we all these days?

—

Kendrick had Maya Angelou; I had my Grandma Sue, my mom’s mom. She lived forty-five minutes away from us, and she slept in my big boy bed whenever she came to visit. I always slept down the hall.

Each morning, earlier than I was supposed to be awake, I snuck out of my room and tip toed over to where Grandma Sue slept. I peeked through the doorway, and inevitably, the bedside lamp was on, and Grandma Sue was propped up in bed, reading her Bible. She looked up at me, and then we both giggled.

“Come up here Drew,” she said while patting the bed beside her.

I wasn’t aware of what holy ground was at the time, but my bare feet were worthy of it.

Up on the bed with her, I burrowed into her side as she told me Bible stories. The Bible says that God covered Moses in the cleft of a rock; I think he did the same for me with my Grandma Sue’s side.

—

The guy who whipped Jackson received the Bible college scholarship the next morning.

Is he a pastor now, standing at a pulpit every week, preaching the Sermon on the Mount, preaching about the meek and the peaceful?

Does he speak for God?

—

“When the lights shut off
And it's my turn to settle down
My main concern
Promise that you will sing about me
Promise that you will sing about me."

-Kendrick Lamar³

I’m reading Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. On the opening page, he describes a child being pulled from rubble in Gaza. It is after another strike. He writes, “Someone nearby asks God for revenge. Perhaps God is here somewhere, also searching.”⁴

There was no bomb over my head last week in Los Angeles. There are plenty in Gaza. And there are Christians surrounding me celebrating each missile strike, believing this furthers the great plan of God. They claim all this bombing is biblical, even while more children are pulled from more piles of rubble.

I do not understand.

—

Last summer, I walked through a bookstore in a coastal California town. Sitting out on a table, I saw a new nonfiction book being promoted. It described the conditions needed for nuclear war.

I didn’t need something to help me catastrophize; I could do that on my own.

It was only days after the first assassination attempt during the rally. I followed the news just like everyone else. I read about the boy/shooter. I read he took a gun from his father. I read he practiced his shot at his local shooting range. I read he bought a ladder from Home Depot and had a homemade bomb in his trunk, just in case.

So, that night, when I sat in an outdoor chapel in the woods, I decided that, should some kid with his father’s gun decide to do something terrifying, I would cover the person next to me with my body and pray.

Is that modern love?

—

My Grandma Sue watched a marriage end and went from financial comfort to working the front counter of the Tastee Freeze in Chandler, Oklahoma. She became a single mother the year my mom turned twelve, moving from the upper-middle-class enclaves to paycheck-to-paycheck.

—

“Often I look up into the clouds and daydream about a better world. But my dreams will never bear fruit unless I keep turning my eyes again and again back to the dust of this earth and listening to what God is saying to me on the road of life.”

-Henri Nouwen⁵

Once, in Sunday School, I heard an old saying about rabbis. Supposedly, the disciples of a rabbi wanted to be covered in the rabbi’s dust; they wanted to be following so closely behind him that the dust from his sandals kicked up and onto their robes. The video in Sunday School asked me if I was walking that closely to Jesus.

I promise I’m not trying to be cute, but all the pictures online of kids being pulled from rubble show them covered in dust, too. Who is their rabbi?

—

I never heard it, but my Mom says Grandma Sue had the gift of tongues. I guess she only did it in her morning devotions, when she would pray for all my family and our future spouses. Sometimes, my mom says, Grandma Sue would do it for my mom when she was sick and home from school.

This might not be theologically accurate, but I like to think God knew my Grandma Sue needed extra intimacy with him, so he gifted her with tongues.

She lived the rest of her life alone after Mom left for college, and I am comforted knowing how intimate she could be with God. I am also comforted when I read about the church as the bride of Christ; I’m glad she was married to Jesus.

—

The Sunday before I walked through that bookstore, a lay preacher at my church used that famous quote from Martin Luther King Jr. about the moral arc of the universe being long but bending toward justice.

I am not someone to disagree with Dr. King, but I have a hard time seeing any moral arc, especially one bending toward justice. Not with children holding their father’s guns or older guys holding curled towels or drone strikes whistling over Gaza. No, I’m coming to believe the earth is not bent toward justice. I’m coming to believe it is bent toward catastrophe, that we are—each of us—in a catechesis of destruction, learning how to implode within ourselves like a dying star.

I think I am growing to agree more with Ta-Nehisi Coates—an atheist—in how he concludes his book We Were Eight Years in Power: “I don't ever want to forget, even with whatever personal victories I achieve, even in the victories we achieve as a people or a nation, that the larger story of America and the world probably does not end well. Our story is a tragedy.”⁶

Yes, I have hope. In God. In family. In friends. In my Grandma Sue. But all of that is against a backdrop of calamity, of chaos. I look around and do not see justice; I do not see this ending well.

—

My Grandma Sue spent a number of years as a lunch lady for the local high school. From all accounts, she was a celebrity.

When she opened gifts at Christmas, she always had the same reaction. She would look at the gift (invariably a sweater), gasp, and say, “What? You shouldn’t have. Ooooooh my, this is gorgeous!” She made you feel like one of the wise men, laying down something precious at her feet.

I asked for Eugene Peterson’s The Message translation for my fifteenth birthday. She got it for me and wrote, just inside the front cover, “To Drew, on his 15th birthday. ‘To love him and to make him known.’ Love, Grandma Sue.”

I once asked her, probably around the age of seventy-five, why she never dated. Her answer came joyfully and quickly: “I just like myself too much.”

—

By his third LP, DAMN, Kendrick Lamar repeats a line throughout the album. It first crops up in the fourth track, “ELEMENT.”: “Ain’t nobody prayin’ for me!”⁷ Later in the first verse of the song, he explains, “…all my grandmas dead / So ain’t nobody prayin’ for me.”⁸

That line—“Ain’t nobody prayin’ for me!”—becomes the chorus of the next song, “FEEL.” That song ends with these lines:⁹

“I feel like the whole world want me to pray for ‘em,
But who the f*** prayin' for me?
Ain't nobody prayin' for me.
Who prayin' for me?
Ain't nobody prayin'."

Those lines have stayed with me ever since I heard them in 2017. When the album came out, my Grandma Sue was still very much alive—vibrant—only displaying minimal signs of the dementia that would eventually settle into her bones. But in 2020, she passed away.

She spent every morning with the Lord, praying for my siblings and my mom and my dad and even my future bride. Sometimes in tongues. I loved knowing she was praying for me.

But now she isn’t.

Our grandmas aren’t praying for us.

—

“However far a person advances upon the Way, all that he discovers is nothing else than the revelation…of baptismal grace.”

-Bishop Kallistos Ware¹⁰

Earlier in the church service—the one with the moral arc of the universe—we got to baptize the son of my rector and her husband. We renounced sin, evil, and the devil and baptized the boy in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, the entire congregation wrapped around the baptismal font, leaning in and looking on in silent anticipation. Somehow, some way, we were watching the fullness of theology take place.

Outside that sanctuary, the world was still spinning. Motives of assassination were questioned, books on nuclear holocaust were sold, and dust-covered children were being pulled out of rubble.

But there, surrounded by a group of people who—outside of fidelity to Christ—had no reason to be together, we were doing something Christians have always done: defying death by creating new life.

—

“Well, Drew,” my Grandma Sue used to tell me, “Cast your cares on him, for he careth for you.”

That was her favorite verse, and if anyone was allowed to say that to me, it was her. Despite being single and paycheck-to-paycheck, despite the harshness of life, she radiated love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control. If anyone can tell me to cast my cares on him, it is her.

So who speaks for God? She does.

The part of me that innately knew that whistle can also recognize God’s voice.

—

“Or in the year that King Uzziah died, or in the year that John F. Kennedy died, or in the year that somebody you loved died, you go into the temple if that is your taste, or you hide your face in the little padded temple of your hands, and a voice says, ‘Whom shall I send into the pain of a world where people die?’ and if you are not careful, you may find yourself answering, ‘Send me.’ You may hear the voice say, ‘Go.’ Just go.”

-Frederick Buechner¹¹

Or in the year that bombs landed in Gaza, or in the year that a firework went off over your head, or in the year that a boy tried to kill a president. Or, or, or.

Every idyllic life will ultimately be unsustainable; the bottom will eventually fall out, along with any semblance of control. And it is in that year—that day—that moment—that we are asked, “Whom shall I send into the pain of a world where people die?”

Will we be willing to say, “Send me?”

Am I willing today—with whistles over Los Angeles and Gaza, with powerful men claiming to be Christians celebrating bombs and whipping the weak—to say, “Send me?”

—

I had the rocker my Grandma Sue rocked me in as a baby until it became too broken to fix last year. My mother gave me another rocker to replace it—the one my Grandma Sue used in her assisted living center. It is that rocker I am sitting in now, looking at the picture of her rocking me as a baby all those years ago.

I wish my Grandma Sue were still alive. I wish I could talk to her now, tell her about the war going on in Gaza and the fireworks over my head. I want to tell her about all the people walking powerful roads, towels in hand, claiming to be the voice of God.

“Well, Drew, cast your cares on him, for he careth for you.”

Those words made sense when my world was as big as my big boy bed, nestled into her side, back when bombs weren’t hurled and detonated into the buildings of “lesser” countries or towels weren’t curled and whipped into the smooth flesh of “weaker” boys.

Do those words still apply today?

—

I think of that boy with his father’s gun; I think of that guy with the towel; I think about whoever launched that firework over my head, and I am reminded of what Tom Junod—the journalist who got to know Mr. Rogers so well—wrote about Fred Rogers back in 2019, after more shootings in El Paso and Dayton:

“[Fred Rogers] would even say that the mass murderers of El Paso and Dayton were children once too—that, in fact, they were very nearly still children, at 21 and 24 years old, respectively…. He would pray for the shooters as well as for their victims, and he would continue to urge us, in what has become one of his most oft quoted lines, to ‘look for the helpers.’”¹²

Am I bold enough to pray for all parties involved—the victims and the offenders, the president and his would-be assassin, the whipper and the whipped? In a world of polarities, can I see through nuanced eyes?

—

When I was in my freshman year of college and living in California, my Grandma Sue was seventy-five. One evening on the phone, she told me she was ready for heaven.

I told her she couldn’t go yet. She needed to see me graduate college, she needed to see me get married, she needed to meet my kids. She said she wanted that too, but she was still ready to be with Jesus.

I didn’t care if she was ready; all I wanted was for my Grandma Sue to stay with me.

I ended the conversation when I began crying too hard to hide it.

I have never met someone who was as married to Jesus as she was.

—

“But I do understand—or intuit, rather—the notion of God not above or beyond or immune to human suffering, but in the very midst of it, intimately with us in our sorrow, our sense of abandonment, our hellish astonishment at finding ourselves utterly alone, utterly helpless.”

-Christian Wiman¹³

I am still troubled by those children covered in dust. The ones—both dead and alive—being pulled from rubble that used to be apartments or schools or hospitals or bus stations. What does that dust signify? What are they learning from it? Is it purposeless, just dust kicked up from the sandals of foreign enemies? Is it all just one long catechesis of destruction?

And Jackson. How long will he and countless others be whipped by more powerful Christians? When will his day in the sun come? When will the scholarship go to the ones who actually deserve it?

And the powerful and loud Christians claiming a heavenly victory, the ones with the towels. Will they always be experiencing “God’s” favor? Will they always be able to claim God’s hand providing an abundant life? When will justice roll down?

I do not know.

—

Even after the years-long onslaught of dementia, when my Grandma Sue was nonverbal and spent most of the day sitting in her rocker, the one I sit in now to write, she could still sing her favorite hymn, “In the Garden.” My mom—bless her—recorded it for all of us to have.

Grandma Sue died a few months after that recording; it was the height of the pandemic and isolation combined with a bout of salmonella and the final stages of dementia left her a shell of her vibrant self. But her nurses loved her through it all; she was still there, perhaps only partially, but you could still see the spark; the night she died, a nurse came while off duty to hug my mom and say goodbye.

Her funeral was held at the First Baptist Church in Chandler, Oklahoma. I didn’t know how many people to expect, it being Covid and all. But the sanctuary began to fill up because people loved my Grandma Sue.

I cried a lot throughout the service. I wasn’t sure if they were tears of joy or tears of sadness. Probably both.

—

“I stay with the dying, and I do not look away.”

-

Andy Squyres

¹⁴

I am reminded of Hagar and Ishmael. She was not the chosen mother of Israel, and he was not the promised descendent. They were not the ones from whom all the sands of the seashore would follow.

But she—a foreigner and outcast—is the first in the Bible to name God. El Roi. The God who sees.

I believe—I hope—the same for those children covered in dust and for Jackson. I believe God still sees. And I believe God still suffers alongside, even while those claiming his voice shout into the void.

“Perhaps God is here somewhere, also searching.”¹⁵

—

Faithfulness today is much quieter than unfaithfulness. It does not get airtime in the ways that the “Christian” prognosticators, the “prophets,” and the specters of Christendom get airtime. But that does not mean it is not strong. God’s voice still speaks through the church. That great cloud of witnesses is still great, even if they aren’t very loud.

And that’s okay. In Life of the Beloved, Henri Nouwen writes,

“We may be little, insignificant servants in the eyes of a world motivated by efficiency, control and success. But when we realize that God has chosen us from all eternity, sent us into the world as the blessed ones, handed us over to suffering, can’t we, then, also trust that our little lives will multiply themselves and be able to fulfill the needs of countless people?”¹⁶

It is not up to us to count the people affected. It is simply up to us to live.

My Grandma Sue embodied that. The pastor who gave the eulogy at her funeral said she would sometimes come up to him and ask him how to evangelize without sounding judgy or hypocritical. She was determined to model the love of Jesus.

Quietly. Faithfully.

—

“To say that Christ takes upon himself the sins of the world is to say that he takes upon himself the suffering of the world too.”

-Frederick Buechner¹⁷

“Quiet faithfulness”—there is something I really like about that phrase. And quiet lives—like my Grandma Sue’s—will, more often than not, fail to make the news or show up on the pages of novels or the screens of theaters. But, as Nouwen said, they just might “fulfill the needs of countless people.”

And quietly and faithfully living in this land of death has to be tangible. It has to be coated in the dust of the earth. It is working the front counter of the Tastee Freeze to support a young daughter. It is praying for both the victim and the perpetrator. It is speaking justice in a world bent toward the rich and the powerful. Tangible, tangible, tangible.

—

I know my Grandma Sue is finally in that garden in the sky, tarrying there.

I have never met someone who was married to Jesus as she was. And she is married now more than ever.

—

There is still much that can be said: hurt and brokenness and power-hungry people play-acting a powerful Christianity, claiming, as Henri Nouwen puts it, “to be followers of the poor and powerless Jesus.”¹⁸

But for all their brash fury, they cannot quench this quiet faithfulness.

That’s what my Grandma Sue modeled.

And there are others like my Grandma Sue out there; I have to believe that.

—

There is much death.

But there is also so much life.

---

1. Kendrick Lamar, “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst,” recorded 2012, track 10 on Good Kid, m.A.A.d city, Aftermath/Interscope, Apple Music.

2. Kendrick Lamar, “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst.”

3. Ibid.

4. Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025), 3.

5. Henri Nouwen, Discernment (New York: HarperOne, 2013), 54.

6. Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (New York: One World Publishing, 2017), 289.

7. Kendrick Lamar, “ELEMENT.” Recorded 2017, track 4 on DAMN. Aftermath/Interscope, Apple Music.

8. Kendrick Lamar, “ELEMENT.”

9. Kendrick Lamar, “FEEL.” Recorded 2017, track 5 on DAMN. Aftermath/Interscope, Apple Music.

10. Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (Yonkers: SVS Press, 1982), 109.

11. Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons (New York: HarperOne, 2006), 36.

12. Tom Junod, “My Friend Mister Rogers,” The Atlantic, December 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/what-would-mister-rogers-do/600772/.

13. Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss (New York: Farrar, Giroux, and Strauss, 2015), 134.

14. Squyres, Andy, “Gutter Punk,” Miracle Service - EP, 2025.

15. Omar El Akkad, 3.

16. Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 97.

17. Frederick Buechner, Now & Then (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 103.

18. Nouwen, Henri, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1989), 59.