This post may or may not end up having much to do with coaching sports, but I can’t write about anything else today. This won’t come as a great shock to you, but our world is broken. It’s gone horribly wrong. We all know that and experience the consequences of that brokenness routinely. At the same time, in my suburban bubble, the most obvious brokenness in our world tends to show up on the news or in the lives of people I don’t know very well. As I write this, I just came from a meeting with a coach who has become a friend of mine. He works at a high school in inner-Kansas City, and he and one of his coaching colleagues invited me to speak to a 40-50 of the students at their school on a weekly basis for most of this past spring. I would show up at their school, visit informally with the kids for a few minutes, then give them a 10-20 minute talk. I kept it pretty straightforward, talking about choices, God’s love, forgiveness…stuff like that. I didn’t have a great feel for whether or not anything I said was sinking in, but I figured it certainly couldn’t hurt.
This morning, in our conversation, this coach mentioned that one of the girls who showed up to our meetings a few times had been shot in late April. I assumed at first that she had been injured and was probably on the road to recovery, but when I asked, he told me that she had been murdered. My friend described her, trying to help me remember me who she was, and I couldn’t really place her, but I found myself absolutely heartbroken at the thought that some young lady that I’d been in front of multiple times in the last few months had been killed on the street. That’s crazy, right? I mean, we know that cities can be violent, and that things like this happen all too often. But in our backyard? To young people who are students of people that I meet with often? That stunned me.
But what absolutely rocked my world was when I realized that I’d been back at that school a couple times in early May, and no one had mentioned any of this to me then. Not saying they didn’t care, but apparently an event like this is common enough that nobody at the school was shocked enough to bring it up when I visited after the fact. That’s unbelievable. Coach told me this morning that this young lady had been guilty of walking on streets she’d been warned to stay off of. The area was about a mile and a half from where she usually spent her time. I’m not naive…I know this type of existence is the cold, hard reality for millions of people in cities across our country. I also know that if something similar happened in our suburban town everybody I know here would be consumed by the tragedy of it all. It would dominate our thoughts for months. But in the city, it was practically business as usual.
I don’t know what my point is. Maybe I don’t have one. I’m saddened. I’m angry. And I don’t really know who I’m angry with. I guess my anger is directed at the systemic issues that have created these types of environments and situations, and the people who get caught up in these systems who make a decision to hurt others. I also don’t really know how the work we’re doing with coaches throughout the metro area can be used to be part of the solution in the inner city. And maybe there isn’t a solution for the macro-level issues in the inner city. Maybe our best bet is to serve people on a micro level, hoping their eyes are opened to something greater. Also, I’m not saying that the work we do with coaches in suburban and rural areas isn’t important. Of course it is. People everywhere have stuff to work through, and we exist to help and serve coaches throughout the entire KC area.
But at the risk of sounding cynical or jaded, as I drove back home through some of the most privileged areas to be found anywhere in the U.S., I was struck by the contrast between where I live and where some of my friends work. I have a renewed desire to see people’s lives redeemed in inner-Kansas City, and I am asking God to show us what role this Community for Coaches ministry should play in that effort.
80’s Lyric
Take these broken wings
And learn to fly again, learn to live so free
– Mr. Mister (1985)