Straight Outta….

It was an aspect of African American culture I didn’t want to understand or consume. For some, these ice cold pied pipers milked America’s youth of their parents’ money and offered it up on the altar of undiluted excess in every realm of the word possible. Reality rap they called it. Hood music others termed it. Well I didn’t get it. Well, not at the time.

Planet earth has become a woefully awful existence for pretty much all of its inhabitants. The “hood” of the universe, the “ghetto” of the galaxies. Located nowhere near anything pure and for good reason too. But God’s eye and loving care hasn’t only been ON this sinful rock, He literally became one of us. Susceptible to sin and all of its evil possibilities. Born into a low class family in a small town of Israel prejudiced by its neighbors to the point when Nathaniel, a prospective disciple was told of who Jesus was and where he was from that he instantly declared, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth!” Can anything good come out of Tivoli? Flankers? Jacks Hill, Compton, Hollywood…Earth? Well thank God for grace. It never ceases to shock and awe. So amazing this is, where even angels long to look into these things.

Our ignorance of another’s struggle does not revoke the divine price tag stamped on their soul before time was barred this planet in. We write people off with our holy highlighters, drawing lines God never put down. But grace isn’t polite. It breaks rules, scandalizes saints, and redeems what we swore was unsalvageable. God isn’t afraid of the trap house, the dancehall, or the dirty verses screamed into microphones soaked in pain. Ask the woman about to be stoned, ask the thief on the cross. You will learn that His blood runs deeper than the ink on any rap sheet or the bassline of any gunman anthem. If you let Him, He’ll use YOUR life to speak life into those you once crossed the street to avoid. So unlearn your prejudice. Dismantle your respectability theology. And open your soul to an altar not gated by decency, but flooded with mercy—wide enough for every sinner, saint, and sound system rebel still searching for a place to belong.

— YorkAli Walters