"Interrogatives............"

I’m five chapters into the autobiography of Malcolm X, a life violently taken in 1965, his name familiar to me only through the report of his death. I was twenty-three years old, going through a year of learning Russian in Monterey, California, courtesy of the United States Navy, married but ten months and my wife already pregnant carrying our first daughter. He was merely a black man in the news, another element of the racial upheaval taking place in this country, someone involved in “radical” protest, killed by his own people. Beth and I would spend a tour on a hunk of rock out in the Aleutian Islands before returning to Washington, D.C. and witnessing firsthand a bit of the “dream”, the anger, indeed history unfolding. It would be over a decade, however, before coming to Christ would open my eyes to the world around me, humanity in general, and my responsibility in the midst of it all. Now, in perusing this man’s life as he lays it out before me, I can see myself in his shoes and understand a bit of what brought him to his early hatred of white America and a rejection of Christianity as a whole. It was a different era, his culture and childhood environment nothing like my own. The Caucasian church in his neck of the woods worshipped on Sundays and lynched “misbehaving negroes” on Monday. Completing that picture, his own father was a pastor, one that would “preach the house down” and then come home to beat and abuse the wife and kids. Malcolm would become a teenage drug-addicted hustler on the streets of Harlem and eventually do time in prison, a Muslim group called “The Nation of Islam” gaining his allegiance, he rising within its ranks before finally walking away from the violence it advocated. Such action prompted his assassination. Just another ghetto casualty? No concern of mine? There are many questions we might ask, no real answers if we are honest. Some would be quick to condemn him, there being no evidence of him ever coming to Christ; but, as for me, such judgment belongs to the Creator. He who knows all things, a man’s history, a man’s heart, and a man’s head, points to finality, in that day, beginning at the house of God…….