Weekend Freewrite -2/1/2020 - Single Prompt Option CONTINUATION: Futility

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Captain Lee's prediction was already a known fact at the Church in the Midst of Life; someone had slipped Mrs. Baxter a note the previous Friday that all the families – all 12,000 families who had family members uncounted in the official tally of the dead in the Ridgeline Fire had been organized to demand that Big Loft's district attorney add counts to the murder charges against Bruce Deadwood for each of the 12,000, at 1,200 families coming into downtown Big Loft at a time.

Thus Rev. and Mrs. Baxter knew that Big Loft was going to be locked up, Monday through Friday, at lunch time and at rush hour UNLESS someone in authority decided to do an official re-count of the victims of the fire and acknowledge the 12,000 Black and Latino servants that had perished in the blaze so that the district attorney's office could just use the list instead of trying to add 2,400 names a day, one by one.

Rev. and Mrs. Baxter, who were Black, shared the information with Rev. and Mrs. Gordon, who were White. Then, the four co-founders of the Church in the Midst of Life knelt down and prayed together about what the church should do.

Thus, it had been three days of getting ready for the church to put out that sign at 11:45 on Monday: “Free Lunch and Holy Happy Hour HERE!”

Nobody had understood until 12:10pm why that was important, and necessary. Not that many people came in at lunch time; folks spent much of lunch time fighting against the futility of the destruction of their routines.

But when the second delegation of 1,200 families drove in beginning at 4:30, then things got real. 4:30 because they had to start getting into the district attorney's office just before closing, in such numbers that the office could not close.

The same numbers meant that when people got off from work at 5:00, there was nowhere for them to go. The crowd trying to get out was sealed off by those still coming in, and by those already in crowding the streets. Big Loft's downtown normally did not clear out until around 6:30; on this day, it would be more like 9:00.

People who had made policy for years and decades that had added futility to the hopes and dreams of many others never expected that they would get their taste – but indeed, the big wigs of Big Loft who did not live in the downtown area were held captive in their own citadel – and they did not know it had been planned as meticulously as they had planned, for years and for decades, to hold so many others back.

And this is why food and a soda fountain and plenty of space for a refuge from the noise and frankly the trauma of all that traffic became an irresistible draw for many of the trapped people looking for food and shelter, and this led to people who cared nothing about church or the real Christ finding that food and shelter by the grace of both. This in turn led to people encountering what the true church looked like – those saved from sin by grace through faith in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ upon the cross for their sins and in His resurrection, out of every tribe and nation, serving with equal rights and privileges and participation in the blessings of God by the power of His Spirit.

“This is a church?” one person or another said. “All this equal mixing – and you are in authority here?”

“Yes, sir,” said Rev. Baxter, “I am an elder here with the same authority as Rev. Gordon because we have exactly the same calling and role to serve the Lord by serving this community. And yes, sir, this is a church – and should you want to go to Heaven, you might want to consider that when the whole church is someday gathered there, it's going to be much more like this than what you are probably used to.”

Photo by Iwona Castiello d'Antonio on Unsplash