When God Tells You Who You Are…Believe Him

Maya Angelou said, “When people tell you who they are, believe them.”

God said it better:

I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Your works, and my soul knows it very well. Psalm 139:14

In this time of unbridled divisiveness and unfiltered verbal venom, be reminded that speech is revealed reality. Some of man-speech is out of line. Some of it lines up with God-speak. Who do you believe?

I believed the court one tennis group I used to play with when they told me who they were: ignorant, unfaithful, and blind. Court one is where the best, the top-shelf gamers, the better than the court two players played. Every week we met between the lines and were assigned a court based on skill, character aside.

“Serena looks like a silverback. I prefer Sharapova,” someone said on court one. I know who, but it didn’t matter because no one on court one spoke up to refute it; thus—in my mind—they all said it. With purpose and malice, they said the greatest tennis player ever was an ape and her Russian rival was more the apple of their eye. They said it within earshot to bait me. I paused for a moment as I was preparing to serve on my court—the lesser court. I stepped back and looked over to court one, paused again, then stepped up to the line to serve. “The score is 30 all,” my opponents on my court said, thinking my pause was out of confusion of the score. It wasn’t, far from it. What was undeciphered by others was perceptible to me. Those words were meant to push my button. Yet, I refused to respond. I served on, won the game and the set. My victory was more than a score.

With arsenic intentions and ace-like accuracy, court one was outside the lines of intelligence.

They judged Serena Williams by her looks. She was not fitting of the normative gaze of Roman noses, thin lips, and narrow hips of some bygone, renaissance age of Mona Lisa, and Camille Monet and a Child in the Artist's Garden in Argenteuil. What does Serena’s robust thighs, broad nose and lioness head have to do with the power of her serve, the steeliness of her nerves, and the courage of her journey from Compton to Wimbledon? When it’s match point against you, what does thickness have to do with toughness. To the unknowing, uninformed, and insecure, everything. It validates the game you pay: ignorance. The ignorant man look looks on the outside. The deeper man looks at the heart. Kid David was chosen as King David, not for his ruddiness of skin, but for his readiness of heart (1 Samuel 16:7).

With unforced errors, unmerited malice, court one was also outside the bounds of faithfulness, if not to God, certainly to country. By preferring Sharapova over Serena, they were siding with the Soviets: Stalin, Lenin, and the Cuban missiles of October. Their comments had nothing to do with forehand form, but rather the function of selective civics, of choosing, unwittingly, the Soviet’s red hammer and sickle over the red, white, and blue of the ideologies and idolatries of our rocket’s red glare. The Williams sisters under the visionary hand of King Richard—their father—have done more to advance the American-dream of an “pull-up-by your own-boot straps” ethos by adding their own styles of braids and laser beam two-hand backhands—straight out of Compton, straight up Mount Olympic in the conquest of gold. With court one’s adoration of the “Russian Barbie with the loud grunt”, they were waving their strange and self-styled banner, not of patriotism, but all things Putin and KGB. Soviet Barbie infiltrated the American dream tennis machine—the Bollettieri Academy—sucked the milk of a million-dollar tennis teat only to carry the flag of mother Russia in London, 2012. By siding with Sharapova over Serena, the good old boys of court one showed their true colors and sang their off-key anthem: “Oh say can you see, by Kremlin’s early light.” And they dare criticize Kaepernick for taking a knee. Court one took a seat on Old Glory.

Finally, with the double-fault of ignorance and treason, the court one boys tripped in their own blindness. John McEnroe at Wimbledon once screamed at a "blind" tennis official, “You can’t be serious,” when a ball clearly in was called out. He had a meltdown. The “Serena is a silver back. I prefer Sharapova” remark, conversely, was clearly out—out of the bounds of decency, honesty, and truth—but everyone on the courts that day (except me), called those comments in by their silence. It deserved a meltdown, a reaction by someone. But the God-fearing, cross-wearing, flag-waving, hand over the heart national anthem singing, good old boys, red-blooded Americans never said a mumbling word. Why should they? By silence, they were saying, “I agree she is an ape, sub-human, sub-American.” They saw nothing wrong, and, by familiarity, see me and others who look like her and me as the same.

By their silence, they were saying, “We can say the “ape word”—an equivalent to the N-word—right in front of you because they don’t see you. What is really being said when people said I don’t see color: I don’t acknowledge you, your story, the artistry of your Maker. And when you operate in that kind of blindness, because they can’t see me, they can’t see Serena, they can’t see Genesis 1:26’s Imago Dei, thus you can’t see their true self.

McEnroe’s “You’ve got to be kidding” melt down worked for him. It lit his fire. Although he lost the point, he went on to win the match and the Championship.

Melt downs don’t work for everyone. In the game ignorance, faithless-ness, and blindness , “losing it” is a step away from a loss. In this current age of divisiveness, pushing the buttons is their point. “There goes another angry negro.” Do not fall for it. That day of the “Silverback shot” I refused the bait. Court one would go home with a deep ravine awaiting them: their children’s teeth will forever be set on edge by the sour grapes of their fathers’ blindness, that America will never be fully the America they want for their—constituted on paper, and realized in practice “as one nation under God, indivisible,” where all men are, not just created equal, but treated equal, with truth and justice for all.

It is true, according to Maya Angelo: Believe it when people tell you who they are especially when they are ignorant, unfaithful, and blind. Better yet, believe it when God tells you who you are:

“You are fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14), made in in His image (Gen.1:26).

And that my friend is game set and match.