I have never met Shyheim Buford

I have never met Shyheim Buford, a seventeen year old young man who, by all accounts from my roommate, was a kind and lively teenager, the sort who was and would have been a role model for the younger ones in our neighborhoods here in Wilmington, Delaware. He was even a street leader once in Urban Promise, working with elementary school kids in after school tutoring and activities and joy. It is not an easy thing to develop a good reputation, but that is exactly what my roommate, whose job is working with youth in the city, described about him.

I will never meet Shyheim Buford in this life because he was shot fifteen times to death. According to the word on the street, he was being robbed at gunpoint but managed to knock the gun away and run. He almost got home, but someone (perhaps even more than one) chased him down and shot him to death. They shot him fifteen times, so the story goes though the newspaper only describes four or five. Either way, he died on the scene.

Below is a map of shootings in Wilmington over the past year alone. It is updated roughly once a week by the state newspaper, and this death is too recent to be shown here. It also does not show the two men shot less than 24 hours later around the same block, which occurred despite friends urging on Facebook that there not be “retaliation.”

Even while typing this, I heard a single shot ring out somewhere close enough to take pause. Would I read about another Shyheim in the newspaper tomorrow? Will my own neighbors or friends or my self become a similar statistic some day?

In church today, the sermon was about Jesus’ words on worry:

And [Jesus] said to his disciples, “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will put on. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest? – Luke 12

There is a fine line between living a worry-free life and living a fatalistic one. I struggle with the difference every day, bouncing between a hospital where we are resuscitating or pronouncing dead patients on a regular basis and a neighborhood where it feels like more of the same. On many days, I struggle with feeling the victories of “helping” people who recover just as much as I feel the sorrow of “losing” those who succumb to their illnesses. It feels as if I cannot accept the responsibility of one without the other, and consequently I waver between feeling proud and feeling guilty even as I realize that I can never claim full credit for either.

The very next passage of Scripture surprised me, even though I had read it many times before:

Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

What do these words mean to me? It says that what I long for has already been promised: that all of the angst and grief and deep longing for that which right and true is not wasted, but instead deepens my moneybags, the intrinsic capacity of my soul to one day be filled with a future joy that cannot be robbed, murdered or destroyed.

Christe eleison! Shyheim, I look forward to the day when we will become true neighbors at last.

I live somewhere between the numbers 18 and 6