Through Tyre’s Lens, Asian American Grief, A Prayer for When People Terrorize
KTF Weekly Newsletter
Hey everybody,
Wherever you find yourself on your journey this week, we hope that you are being reminded that His mercies are new every morning, His kingdom is coming and has come, and we are certainly not alone or left wanting on our walk of faith. The Lord truly is our Shepherd and He will guide us through the chaos to green pastures, no matter how treacherous the wilderness may be.
Someone deeply acquainted with the wilderness and the Jesus who leads us through it is Tamice Spencer-Helms. Tamice has been hard at work on her powerhouse debut, Faith Unleavened: The Wilderness Between Trayvon Martin and George Floyd. The book will be available for pre-order starting February 7, but we will also be sharing advance reader copies with anyone interested in joining her launch team. For more information on what that entails and how to sign up, CLICK HERE.
And with that, on to our resources for this week...
Jonathan’s recommendations:
Often when tragedies happen, the scale becomes so large so quickly that individuals, their families, and the total and permanent disruption of their everyday lives get lost in the shuffle. It is difficult to grasp the intimate and institutional implications of gun control, White Supremacy, colonization, immigration, and racism but, Erina Kim-Eubanks—co-minister at Bethel Community Church in San Leandro California—manages to do so with this poem. The violence of the past few weeks in Monterey Park, Half Moon Bay, Memphis, and more that are not in our newsfeeds is personal and collective, has individual and geopolitical implications, and to try to hold that in tension is a Herculean task. Fortunately, it is not our job to do so. Leaving colonized faith means leaving narratives that we have to know what to do, must continue to be productive, or must subdue our feelings to maintain composure and appear acceptable and fine. We can feel, grieve, shout, and shake knowing that the God who sees is near to the broken-hearted, accepts us, and calls us His own.
“A Prayer for When People Terrorize” by Kenji Kuramitsu is featured in A Booklet of Uncommon Prayer and showed up in the Christians for Social Action Instagram feed last week. It is a hard prayer but a necessary one that leads us away from the false peace that state violence promises and towards our identity as ministers of reconciliation and seekers of God's justice and righteousness. In moments of communal trauma and pain, some words from Jesus in scripture can be comforting and others challengingly uncomfortable. This prayer leans towards the latter and is focused, pithy, and clear in its commanding invitation. May its words find good soil in your heart as you read it because the world is in need of the kind of peacemakers that Jesus calls blessed in His Beatitudes.
To watch or not to watch was the question as every media outlet seemed to be announcing that the murder of Tyre Nichols was going to premiere like a feature film last Friday evening. But for many, the choice to witness a man made in the image of God be pummeled by those who would crush the imago Dei in him was one made by an algorithm as the video played automatically in their feeds. There are many problematic things about this increasingly common reality but as BRIDGES, a community team-building organization for youth, stated to ABC 24, people should be “good caretakers of their mental and emotional health.” They created this guide for how to manage the video content that comes across our social media platforms including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. As death and violence permeate our society, I believe it is incumbent upon followers of Jesus to love ourselves through the preservation of our own mental health and to love God and our neighbors by not consuming another person’s destruction in the same vein as cat videos and viral dance moves. Tyre, and so many others are worthy of much more than that.
Suzie’s recommendations:
A system that was built to control and destroy Black bodies will condition its officers and officials to do the same. That is why it does not matter if the officers who murdered Tyre Nichols were Black or white. Several months ago, Dr. Jemar Tisby shared the article that he says “changed [his] outlook on policing.” In that piece, fellow historian Keri Leigh Merritt describes how policing evolved into a means to oppress, incarcerate, and extract free labor from freedmen following emancipation. Merritt attests to how the system of law enforcement and convict leasing forged in the Reconstruction era was brutal and often deadly. She quotes one prison bureaucrat who observed that, “if tombstones were erected over the graves of all the convicts who fell either by the bullet of the overseer or his guards during the construction of one of the railroads, it would be one continuous graveyard from one end to the other.” It is unconscionable that we who claim to follow a God of abundant life would support and uphold systems of destruction and death. Surely there must be a better way, and Christ compels us to find it.
This poignant reflection for The Atlantic by Katherine Hu captures well the pain and beauty of a Lunar New Year overshadowed by tragedy. In many ways this dichotomy reflects the broader AAPI experience in America—moments of possibility, celebration, and hope punctuated by simultaneous violence, exclusion, and loss. We continue to mourn with our AAPI siblings and to pray for peace and healing in the New Year. May we all continue to make space to enter into this season of Asian American grief.
Tyre Nichols deserves to be remembered for the way that he lived, not just the tragedy of how he died. On his personal website he quotes Joel Strasser, “A photographer must love life more than photography itself.” I encourage you to look through Tyre’s photography and, just for a moment, see the world through his eyes. Because if we can remember Tyre when we watch the sunset and not just when we are sickened and infuriated by police brutality, then maybe we can truly affirm that Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter because Black joy matters and Black wonder matters. Black Lives Matter because the beauty beheld by Black eyes matters, and those eyes deserve to grow old and wrinkled and to marvel at so many more painted skies than Tyre was allowed to see.
Thanks for reading.
The KTF team