“How many times have I been put at the front of the line without even knowing there was a line? How many times have I walked through a door that opened, invisibly and silently, for me, but slammed shut for others? How many lines have I cut in a life of privilege?” --Andy Crouch, author
Sometimes getting ahead in this life all depends on where your find yourself standing in line.
Take Verdah Tetteh, a member of Fitchburg High School class of 2021, first in line among her classmates, at least academically. At the school’s June 4th graduation ceremony Tetteh, a first-generation daughter of her mother from Ghana, was awarded her school’s General Excellence Award, that included a $40,000 scholarship. The Harvard University bound Tetteh might have been content to just accept the check and head for Cambridge, take the money and run. But then she did the most surprising and selfless of acts.
She gave it all away. Yup. All of it. Every last penny.
Tetteh decided on the spot that day to ask that the school instead award those funds to a fellow classmate in greater financial need than her. A person of deep faith, Tetteh did what most folks do not do when they are standing at the front of the line. In first place. In a place of great advantage. She looked back and knew in her heart that her responsibility was to help the folks who were in the long line behind her.
Said Tetteh, “I am so very grateful for this, but I also know that I am not the one who needs this the most. Knowing my mom went to community college, and how much that was helpful, I would be so very grateful if administration would consider giving the … scholarship to someone who is going to community college.”
What would our world be like if more and more folks like Tetteh remembered just where they stand in the line of life and chose to look back and then do something? Be more generous. Help others to move up in the line. Show mercy. Act with compassion. Maybe even move backwards to stand in solidarity and support with the many at the way, way back of the line.
It’s been a hard year for the people in our world who are at the back of the line. Folks who suffered through COVID, low wage workers who could not afford to stay home, neighbors who had poor access to health care and got sick or died because of this disparity. That’s a very long line. There’s also the line of racism that tells folks of color they don’t get to move to the front, a line that’s been holding them back for so, so many years. A line that once led to the very back of the bus, not so long ago, not when you look at the long arc of American history.
Makes me look at where I stand in line.
At the very front, truth be told. I’ve got a great place in line; have since the day I was born. Not once in my long life have I ever been told to go to the back of the line because of my gender or because of my skin color or because of who I choose to love or because of the faith I practice or because of my heritage. Nope. Sometimes I’ve actually been ushered to the front. This way sir!
Our country is caught up right now in a struggle that is at once very new and as old as our republic. Is there really equality of opportunity when it comes to deciding where each of us as citizens get to stand in line? Or are there instead systemic forces that try their best to keep certain people at the back and certain people right up front, behind a velvet VIP rope in fact, first among unequals?
The person who began the faith I try to practice was an infamous line cutter. But the strange thing, is that he always seemed to be moving backwards in line, not forwards. Standing with the powerless and not the fat cats. In his world he chose to be with the poor and the excluded, the orphan and the widow, the sick and the lonely. He knew he could not be truly free, and his world would not be truly just, unless the line was in fact, flipped. Reversed. The first last and the last first, as he once said.
What a crazy guy, huh? Who’d want to live in a world like that?
Where the rich and the powerful, the privileged and the advantaged, have to stand in line like everyone else, maybe even give up their place for someone who does not get the breaks or the perks. People like me at the very front. Maybe like you too. What would this life be like if we all followed Tetteh, as she seemingly took the wrong way on her graduation day? On her way to Harvard but not before taking the hand of another, a fellow child of God, and inviting them to move up in the line.
Thank you Verdah: for your example and for your challenge to others, to all of us, in the line called human life. Something tells me that even before you got into Harvard, with your big heart, you were already first in line.
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