People Are Not Illegal

I don't know when we decided that it was okay 

to bind the wrists of others together with caution tape

To place warning signs on someone’s race

To make them feel less than human

Less than alive

This world thrives on compromising people's worth for the sake of feeling unjustly safe 

Entanglements of lies, how can we look into a child's eyes and deny them a future

Children should not be born with statistics etched into their DNA

I am a child who was born into privilege

Chances are slim that I will ever be seen as a threat

I have never been stopped and frisked on a city street

Or had my level of intelligence determined from the way I speak

I have never been unjustly accused of a crime and held behind bars even though my ancestors fought merely decades ago for the very freedom I have been denied

That is not me

But I can plainly see the amount of brokenness that is upheld in this nation

We've been looking for clarity through a shattered magnifying glass

that we have named justice

Serving a system that should be called illegal, not it's people
Lack of humanity has created an “us” and a “them” instead of a we

And yet I follow a Savior who probably would have been named "illegal"

Would Jesus have been able to get through airport security without being "randomly searched"?

Would my Lord have been welcomed even into the church

without being looked at with a shred of suspicion 

Our mission shouldn't be to change just the way we act but the way we see

Asking God to dilate our pupils so that we can let in more light

I've come to the conclusion that our pointer fingers are a lot stronger than our feet

We love to stand in light and point to darkness

We think and talk and proclaim

Hoping we'll inspire change

But we rarely go and do 

We point to problems more often than we solve them 

Even though our feet are begging to march

To march towards a day abounding with hope

Barriers broken, voices heard

A day where this messy kingdom is restored

People no longer ignored as a number

Or branded as illegal, caught up in vicious cycles

We march toward a day where our feet will always empathize with the footsteps of our brothers and sisters

A day where everyone will be named with endless love