Overhearing that conversation between two Christian friends shocked me for a moment. I took my eyes off my giggling son and glanced over. The conversation was continuing but I was still replaying those words in my head. I had forgotten how the Christian world views drug use. After two days in inner city Baltimore I don`t even find a dispute between someone smoking a cigarette or someone smoking weed. I am no longer shocked when the person I`m talking to raises their arms to gesticulate and I find a map of track marks. I step over the needles in my yard, leaving them for my police officer husband to require charge of while I pluck up any baggies of crack leftover from a drug raid of the family next door. Enforcement personnel (like my husband) and those involved in rehabilitation are waging a physical struggle in a religious war. The drug market does not be because there is a need for drugs. The drug market exists because it creates places for people who, in this world, have no place. It creates a place for people who bear no home, a job for people who would never be granted a job. It creates a way for little boys still in elementary school to have some of the financial burden off their mother`s or their siblings. It creates a home for still the last of the low. The man outside of the interior city has declared them all worthless. They find it when they go to the post office and are greeted with a square bulwark of bulletproof plexi-glass and denied even the use of a pen. They find it when they go to the Social Security office or the DMV and are treated like animals. I live because I have been treated like one of them. The drug markets, the corners of inner city Baltimore, create a man in which they matter, where they can distinctly see their relevancy and their worth. Each man plays a part; each is required for the organization to exist. The runners, the touts, the slingers, the get up boys_even the police play a role. How do you push a war of relevancy with a wand and a gun? The despair is like a midnight ink that stains everything it comes in touch with. The soil stays on you and alters the way you see the world. As a crucial member of this market, my husband is, in effect, watching the earth from the same stand as the people he battles against. Both polish and the Church solidify those positions by grouping police officers and criminals into underground warring factions that are highly irrelevant to daily life. There has to be something deeper that changes lives. We want to be offering something of esteem in point of the needle to a demon or in office of a drinking habit to deal with the despair weighing on a cop`s shoulders. You may sit in your pew and sing songs and remember "these are late and meaningful lyrics" or listen to a sermon and feeling like you`ve actually been taught something, but to mass in my world, it`s worthless. What separates Christ from a drug? What happens when you have a short black inner city man with a criminal record, no education, no place to speak of in legal terms and he get`s saved? He is even going to be a short black inner city man with a criminal record, no training and no place to talk of in legal terms, only now his greatest hope is that he might die very shortly to be with Christ. I live as Christians we are taught to believe of the pat answers in answer to a head like that. "God will provide." "God will change his life." Do not shy away from questions like that. Do not shy away from exposing yourselves to the atrocity`s that live in this world. Do not shield your eyes and harden your hearts. Think about what you are leaving to do for your naked and hungry brother, even before his needle is replaced.
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