This is the Sky

And we are all beneath it

This is the sky.

All of us are beneath it. All of us. And every morning it grows beautiful with light and in the afternoon it warms to the blue of birds and at night the sun sinks down to reveal a belly of stars. And you can find all of us below it, that sky.

I want to tell you a story about someone who lived under the same sky too.

I was a missionary a long time ago in Krasnodar, Russia, and I went about the city with another woman, both of us in our twenties, to find people we could help. It was a beautiful city with wild grapes that draped off buildings and watermelons in the summer dripping onto the streets and wisteria winding through old bricks.

Every week we visited a woman named Baba Tonya. She lived on the outskirts of a smaller village outside Krasnodar. No running water, no electricity. When we would knock on her door, she would pull back the curtain on her peep hole. She would look to the left and to the right. If she saw only us, she would open the door a crack and pull us in. She was old with paper thin butterfly wings of eyelids and taught, wiry muscles pulled over bones.

Every time we saw her, she would tell us the same story about the KGB, holding up her left hand that was missing a finger. My language skills were poor at that point, but I know her story revolved around the KGB and her missing finger. I know that she always whispered, afraid she would be overheard. I know she kept a little black and white snapshot of her son tucked inside the strap of her bra. I know he was killed by someone who shouldn’t have been killing people, for a reason that didn’t exist.

And no matter how many times we visited. No matter how many times we held her hands and sang to her and took her red bucket to the water pump and scalded her milk, she was still afraid.

I was the last person to see her the day before she died, holding her hand, smoothing back her hair. And she asked me if the angels were finally coming to take her. I was so relieved to say yes. So relieved that her lifetime of fear would soon dissolve into the great beyond and she would find peace.

And, right now, as I watch the fear rising around me — fear in me, in my family, in my community, in my country, in my fellow people underneath the sky — I have this to say,

A nation of people who are afraid of their own government, who worry constantly about what will happen next, aren’t a nation of people who live in a democracy.

Whether you’re to the left or the right or are so far spun around you’re neither, it’s time to remember that the sky covers all of us. That we are here to love each other. Love the people who are beneath the sky.

This is the sky.