Last Monday morning I rolled over and I just knew! It felt like my body had been sent through a toaster oven and a washing machine, and come out a churned-up mess on the other side.
Whether it was the swine flu, or just the regular strain, the doctor couldn’t tell me, but as far as I was concerned I had just joined the ranks of victims of the most popular pandemic of the day. And I was almost pleased about it.
There’s something so unabashedly glamorous about contracting a fearsome disease, especially when you get to be by yourself and call it something dramatic like quarantine. You gain a heightened sense of importance as people cower away in the distance at the very sound of your cough. And when every feeble attempt at anything productive is met with a concerned look and a Don’t worry about that—you’re sick, convalescence grows all the more appealing.
Between popping pills and crawling to the bathroom, I must admit that my sense of the cosmic grew. I wanted to be part of something larger than myself—something that would make me feel special—something that would make me feel like a survivor. I wanted to shout from the rooftops, Look at me! I have the swine flu! Don’t you want to be sick and cool like me?
In all unromantic reality, I was boringly sick, and I hated it. Despite all the media hype, this year’s scare craze seems little more than a gross fascination with something as dull as getting the flu.
At 12:35 a.m. on October 24, 1999, the phone rang.
That phone call thrust Carol Kent into a waking nightmare. Her son, 25-year-old Jason, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and a strong Christian, had been charged with the murder of his wife’s ex-husband.
But even as Carol and her husband, Gene, reeled with the devastating news, a story of hope and redemption began emerging alongside the despair.
Five blocks from the National Zoo, a banner outside a brick storefront on Mt. Pleasant Street announces the grand opening of Amani Ya Juu’s first U.S. boutique. Amani, an organization started in 1996 to offer hope and trade skills to struggling women in East Africa, since its summer opening has added an artsy, fair-trade feel to the tony establishments in northwest Washington.
Photo by Lizzie Coombes, courtesy of Music in Prisons
Since the 1920s, when wardens whipped out band tunes to quell skirmishes in chow halls, music has played its way through barbed wire fences and into many a lonely prison cell. It found its way to the fingers of Jewish women in an orchestra at Auschwitz who were forced to serenade Nazi commandants, as well as other prisoners in work gangs. It crooned its way to Folsom State Prison through Johnny Cash’s gravelly blues. And today classical strains waft across jail yards in India, while Venezuelan convicts learn how to play Beethoven, and Maine prisoners pick away at guitars to Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.”
As James Howard, Jr., wiped the fingerprints off his second carjack job, police surrounded the Crips’ leader and yelled at him to throw his hands in the air. He fumbled for a non-existent gun, hoping they would fire. Instead, he heard a strange voice in his head: Pray.
Robbie Robinson arrived in handcuffs for his son’s funeral. Then he stood up and told his family and friends about Christ.
His mother hardly recognized the son who stood before her with peace in his eyes—a young man whose life up until that point had been stamped by drugs, violence, and prison time.
Suzanne Johnson swirls around in the salon chair. A clip restrains some wayward waves on top of her head, the rest of her tresses falling in just-straightened rows down her back. She’s a pretty 34. Long lashes, full pink lips, rosy cheeks. A strange contrast to her drab sweatshirt and jeans, the final reminder of her last day as Oregon inmate number 16047521.
“My hands are sweaty,” she says as she removes the plastic cape and steps down from the barber chair.
The three other women in the room—two of whom are prison hair stylists—gaze curiously at her. Perhaps wishing they were in her shoes. Perhaps dreading the day it will be their turn.
One of the women cheers her on: “Enjoy your freedom!”
The three words resound down the prison hallway as Suzanne steps out into the sunlight, just 20 minutes away from her release from Coffee Creek Correctional Facility on March 30, 2009.
Friendship is a morsel of the Incarnation. As we partake of the bread and the wine, so friendship plays out Christ’s physicality in our lives.
Last week, one of my best friends moved 3,000 horrible miles across the country. Several months of unemployment, ambiguity about the future, and an increasing desire to live out west tugged my friend away from this place, and away from me. I hated to see her to go, but felt even more uneasy about her staying.
There seems to come a time with most good things for an ending to arrive, and resistance to that appropriate ending only prolongs the inevitable. The time had come for Rachel to leave, and I had to let her go.
Exactly four years ago, I stood where I stand today. In May of 2005, I drove away from four years of college and an equal amount of daily, dorm-dwelling friendship with my roommate, my best friend.
I moved to D.C. and began to set up a life for myself in a brand new place, doubtful that I would find friends who could compare to my college soul mates. I was wrong.
To fix or befriend? That is the question that plagues journalist Steve Lopez (played by Robert Downey, Jr., in the poignant true-story film The Soloist, which premiered Friday).
When Lopez, a popular columnist for the L.A. Times, stumbles across Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a schizophrenic homeless musician, a story is born. Soon, Lopez finds himself caught in the tension between crafting a brilliant story about a Juillard student turned homeless man, and looking out for a guy who simply needs someone to care.
But for Lopez, that tension is soon overshadowed by a deeper tension: to help Ayers or simply be his friend?
Holding the microphone close to her little mouth, Kaitlyn stares confidently out into the audience, and begins the first few lines of her favorite song, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me …”
About a year ago, on her way to an audition for America’s Got Talent, then 4-year-old Kaitlyn Maher told her father, “Daddy, I want to see the sparkles come down.” Gently, Reuben told his young daughter that it would be nice if she would make it all the way to the Top 10, but that if it didn’t happen it would be okay.
“Daddy, I’m going to ask Jesus,” Kaitlyn responded, bowing her head to ask Jesus to let her see the confetti fall at the night the winners of the show are announced, but adding that if it wasn’t His will, she didn’t want it.
Despite wowing the crowd with a simple rendition of “Somewhere Out There,” Kaitlyn didn’t make it to the Top 10. But she was invited back for the final night as a special guest. As the confetti fell from the sky, the winner held Kaitlyn high in his arms. Reuben realized that God had answered Kaitlyn’s prayer.
As James Howard, Jr., wiped the fingerprints off his second carjack job, police surrounded the Crips’ leader and yelled at him to throw his hands in the air. He fumbled for a non-existent gun, hoping they would fire. Instead, he heard a strange voice in his head: Pray.
Robbie Robinson arrived in handcuffs for his son’s funeral. Then he stood up and told his family and friends about Christ.
Suzanne Johnson
