Let me tell you about my privilege.
I was conceived when a worldly-wise man in his mid-20s convinced an 18-year-old recent high school graduate that he loved her.
I was born into a shotgun marriage necessitated by my soon arrival in the summer of 1965. I seriously doubt my birth father ever loved my mother.
My birth father was a drunk like his father before him and like all the adult men in the Jackson clan. I’m told he wasn’t a silly drunk or a happy drunk but an angry drunk and a violent drunk. I’m told his drunken rage targeted my 19-year-old mother in brutal displays. She cried out to his family for help, but they showed more sympathy to their son than to the mother of the grandson.
We lived in squalor on Chicago’s Southside where I was born. My maternal grandparents did as much as they could to try to help my mom and me, but when the bread winner drinks away the family’s meager income, what’s left doesn’t go very far.
My birth father blew his brains out in a drunken stupor. There was no life insurance or large savings account to take care of my baby sister and me.
My mom came to faith in Christ prior to high school, but her home did not provide an environment where a young Christian girl could thrive. Somewhere during her high school years, she lost her way. I was not born into the church, had no baby dedication ceremony, and was not positioned to live an abundant life in Jesus Christ. It wasn’t looking good for my future prospects.
Through mutual friends, my mom met Tom. He was a recent convert to Christ after hearing the gospel from a local Baptist pastor. He was a simple man with an elementary school education, but hard working and deeply in love with my mom and her two children. There wasn’t anything my grease-monkey dad wouldn’t do for my mom and us. Years later on his death bed, he looked at the three of us and said, “I’m sure glad I found you guys.”
No longer Jacksons, we were now Verweys (yes, that’s the correct spelling and a story for another time) living very simply in a Southside apartment. God had stopped the madness.
I don’t know how we started going to a Baptist church as a young family, but there I heard the gospel from my Sunday School teachers and from my pastor during his Sunday sermons. God opened my mind to understand the gospel and poured into my heart faith to believe the gospel of his son, Jesus Christ. So commenced my life of privilege.
My privilege began when God stopped the madness that was my reality and my future. My story is not unique to me. Kris, Brenda, Maaike, Dan, Jeff, David, and so many more can tell of the grace of God that radically transformed their lives.
I am married to a godly Dutch girl, a first generation American and the beautiful daughter of immigrants. How our paths crossed asserts another expression of God’s grace. Apart from the mysteries of God, I would know nothing of the former Brenda Koning and she nothing of me. Our shared life might appear privileged to some, and, I suppose it is, but not because of the melatonin levels in our skin pigmentation. My privilege in whatever manifestation observers identify is solely attributed to God’s grace. To say my privilege is because of the melatonin in my skin ignores the sovereignty of God to which I owe all for this life and the life to come.
I decry racism. I decry injustice. I decry punishing the innocent because of association with the guilty. I decry the “it’s not what you know but who know” way of getting ahead in this world. I decry every expression of rebellion against the Creator manifest in the abuse, dismissal, or killing of any of his image bearers.
My life is good, certainly better than I deserve and happier than many. This life I live is not the result of my white privilege. The life I live is the result of the privilege that comes from grace. I will not accept any other explanation.
As always I welcome your feedback and any suggestions you might have for an upcoming Lunchtime Musing.
Mike VerWay
Pastor for Preaching & Vision