I’ve been attempting to write down some thoughts concerning Ahmaud Arbery. Try as I might I can’t.
All I know is that when I go for a run I never need to worry about people driving up and holding me at gunpoint. Pam never needs to worry that I might not come home from a run because I have been shot. Both of our boys are around Ahmaud’s age and they both run. Neither Pam nor I need to warn them that there are people out there who will view them as a threat just for who they are.
The reason for this is the color of my skin. The color of my boys’ skin. I have no idea what I would tell my boys to keep them safe if they were young black men. I hurt for my friends of color. I want to support them. I hope they feel that I do.
I believe God will hold us accountable for supporting the systems that support such hatred. May He have mercy on us. May we begin to view people as He views people and live that view out.
I love the Fred Rogers quote about looking for the helpers in the middle of a crisis. It’s comforting, grounding, and true. But growing up in hurricane territory taught me something else: in every disaster, there are also people who run toward the crisis for entirely different reasons.
Not everyone is running in to help. Some are running in to make money.
Profiteering—especially price gouging—is as predictable in a natural disaster as power outages and long lines at the gas station. These individuals or businesses see emergency as opportunity, a chance to squeeze a windfall out of people who can least afford to lose anything.
Crisis Reveals What Was Already There
Disasters have a way of exposing the small choices we were already making long before the storm—or the virus—ever arrived.
If we’ve been choosing unselfishness in the everyday moments, a crisis tends to magnify that. And the same is true if we’ve been choosing selfishness. The often‑misattributed but well‑phrased line—usually linked to John Wooden but more accurately traced to Heywood Hale Broun—says:
“Sports don’t build character; they reveal it.”
The same principle applies here.
Most people believe they will rise heroically in a moment of great sacrifice. But if sacrificial choices are not already part of our ordinary life, we are unlikely to flip a switch when the stakes get high. And if our normal pattern is to choose ourselves first, that pattern usually shows up in the crisis as well.
COVID‑19 Exposed More Than a Virus
There were—and still are—plenty of people who consistently make selfish choices and who saw COVID‑19 as a new avenue to take advantage of others caught in circumstances they never asked for. Predictably, the ones hurt most tend to be those with the least margin, the fewest resources, and the smallest buffer for loss.
COVID‑19 didn’t create these patterns. It simply revealed them.
What We Claim to Believe Is Being Tested
As a follower of Christ, I believe in a God who says:
the first will be last and the last will be first
His strength is made perfect in weakness
He uses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise
A crisis exposes whether we actually believe these things—or whether they are just words we say when life is easy.
COVID‑19, like every disaster before it, is a revelation. It shows us who runs in to help, who runs in to profit, and what kind of people we have been becoming all along.