Liam, Micah and Me

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.

    And what does the Lord require of you?

To act justly and to love mercy

    and to walk humbly[a] with your God.

(from Micah 6:1-8)

The image of 5-year-old Liam Ramos and his bunny hat surrounded by ICE soldiers still haunts me.

Recognizing he was walking home from preschool, taken from his dad, transferred to a detention facility, and gets sick while confined, doesn’t help.

What kind of experience of loneliness and darkness is this poor child having?

How terrified is this boy being transferred from one place to another by soldiers?

I find this blog difficult to write because I have been through my own “terrors of the night” (PS 91:5) some as a child, some as a teen, some as a young adult, now some as an elder.

This phrase comes from Psalm 91:5, which speaks to finding comfort in faith during times of fear.

What creates the difficulty is the apparent lack of hope in a “terror of the night.”

My hope for Liam Ramos and anyone experiencing loneliness and darkness comes from the Word of the Lord through Micah’s ancient wisdom offering guidance for responding to suffering with justice and compassion."

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
    And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
    and to walk humbly with your God.

For me, this a vision of Jesus’s peaceable kingdom where God’s love defeats the enemies of loneliness and abandonment.

It is a hopeful vision of healing in the dark and broken places of our world.