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For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.

– Psalm 139:13–16, NIV

All Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

I was having a great day on June 17, 2015. One heck of a day; I remember it well.

It started with a beautiful quiet time, exploring Colossians 3, soaking in the rules for daily living. After that, some exercise, no small feat for a barbeque aficionado like me. I made it to work on time, had several client calls, and closed a new deal. Most importantly I was five minutes early for my wife’s prenatal appointment, which received major kudos from Down Below. (Down Below is my loving nickname for my wife Michelle, who was pregnant with our firstborn at the time. She’s “Down Below” because she’s five-feet-nothing on her tiptoes but frequently sends directives up higher.)

One of those days where things are humming on all cylinders.

Life had been good for a while actually. After not the easiest childhood, through grace, hard work, and a few breaks I was doing all right. Four years in the White House as President Obama’s spiritual adviser and head of the faith-based office, the youngest person ever to hold the job, and the first African American. Two years running a successful consulting company, working with great clients on meaningful projects. A world apart from the food stamps my mom had to use as a single parent, or the five-hundred-square-foot apartment she, my father and I later shared. I had come a long way. The sun was shining that day. I was feeling good.

We returned home from the doctor’s office and settled into our evening routine, preparing for bed. But right before we turned the lights out, my cellphone rang.

It was my dad, Rev. W. Antoni Sinkfield, a long-time AME pastor. His voice was shaking. He had just received a phone call himself, from Rev. Steve Singleton, another AME pastor from Charleston, South Carolina.

Steve was the former pastor of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, the person directly preceding Rev. Clementa Pinckney. And Steve had just received his own phone call, from one of his former Emanuel parishioners who that evening had barely escaped being murdered by a gunman who shot and killed nine people in the church basement.

That parishioner did not have a spiritual leader to call, because her own pastor had just been gunned down. So she called her former pastor, Steve. Who called my father. Who called me.

And at once, the spiritual discipline of the day, the satisfaction of accomplishment, the feeling of a life of progress was sapped right out of me. It hit me like a ton of bricks: no matter how far I had come, we had come, I was still black, in America. And at any moment, the demons—the adversary—of our complicated racial past might rise up, and roar like a lion, and devour someone who looks like me, some- one I love, or perhaps even me.

Charleston was a horrible, destabilizing reminder, but black folks had felt that way before, and have since. We had the same unmoored feeling after the Trayvon Martin verdict. The same sickening taste in our mouths when Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old boy playing with a pellet gun, was shot by police in a Cleveland park. The same watery eyes and disbelief when we heard that Sandra Bland died under suspicious circumstances in a Texas jail.

The feeling is essentially this: that while God may have woven us together in the depths of the earth, shaped us in his secret place, and ensured that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, he saw fit to plant us in America. A beautiful, hopeful place in many ways, but one where some of its citizens do not always seem to share God’s view of our humanity.

That’s a stark statement but much of the evidence is incontestable. Less than three hundred years ago, on the spot where I’m typing this article, Prince Georges County, Maryland, actual human beings were bought, sold and worked—similar to cattle or livestock—simply because their skin was brown and those engaging in the commerce were white. From 1882 until 1968—less than fifty years ago—over four thousand real-live people were lynched in this country, strung up from trees, because they were black. My great-grandmother, Ola Mae Webb, who is still alive and thriving at ninety-two, recalls well the days when black folks in her Nashville hometown were not allowed to purchase homes in certain parts of town or hold certain jobs. My grandmother, thirty years younger, remembers the same.

And then there are the present-day tragedies. The Mother Emanuels. The Tamir Rices. The Eric Garners. The Sandra Blands. You thread it together and realize it all makes sense.

God created us in his image, and his likeliness, all of us the same. But in America, through a perversion of Scripture, a level of greed, and abrogation of basic humanity, we somehow convinced ourselves that certain images were less worthy than others. We enslaved and oppressed those lesser images and operated on the basis of their inequality for about 350 years. Around sixty years ago we removed the most discriminatory legal barriers, but the spiritual residue of that former period—five times as long—remains.

This history, this culture, has clouded our vision. It has prevented us from looking at one another through God’s eyes. We think we can see, but we are often walking blind.

For years I have prayed for an awakening, for eyes to be open. Generations of black Christians did the same before me, and many others pray the same prayer today. And God, in his infinite wisdom, is presently answering.

Since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, young activists have taken the country by storm. They’ve shut down buildings, taken over highways, deployed all sorts of strategies that respectable, civil Christians would generally frown upon.

They’re rallying cry, their statement, is “Black Lives Matter.” But hidden within that beautifully simple phrase is also a question for the believers: do you, finally, see me?

Do you see my child as equal in every respect to yours? Irrespective of the sound of my name, my appearance, my gait, am I fully human in your eyes? At the core of your being, do you believe the core of mine was fearfully and wonderfully made?

Activists in the Black Lives Matter movement are forcing these questions into our national dialogue and upon our individual consciences for the first time in a very long time. Rather than reject this movement because we may disagree with some tactics or the general air of disruption they’ve brought to the country, Christians should welcome the pointed moral questions that they raise.

In fact, more than welcome their questions, we might consider praying for these young people protesting in our streets, listening to them, and coming alongside them where we can. There is a great boldness inherent in their movement, a courage that must be spiritually, emotionally and physically draining. They don’t have the covering of traditional civil rights organizations or historic denominations. In many instances they are putting their lives, careers, educations on hold to demand basic human rights for black people. They sense a great wrong and have an impulse for right; we don’t have to agree with their every move to listen, pray and engage with love.

In the end, Black Lives Matter might be opening a critical pathway for healing in the Christian church. The spiritual mess—the residual bias passed down from our complex history—will never be addressed unless it is acknowledged and dealt with. These young activists are forcing us to acknowledge and confront this mess, this bias. It is the task of believers to embrace the tension of this moment, seek the guidance of Holy Spirit regarding the aspects of our racial vision that are still askew, and trust that the same Jesus who perished on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins died for the sin of racism as well, and through his blood and our repentance can heal us completely, once and for all.

Because every day, fellow black Christians and fellow black Americans step into a world where God’s word in Psalm 139 runs into the reality of man’s spiritual blindness. This tension is draining for some, overwhelming for others, and deadly for a tragic few. Thank the Lord that questions are finally being raised that point toward introspection; may we now, with prayer and fasting, go within and seek vision from the One who fully sees.