Just Down The Hall

He was sitting by himself, as police officers often do, at the same restaurant where we saw him a week earlier. That Sunday, my wife smiled and spoke an encouraging word to him as we passed his table. This week, he left before we could do that.

But I stole a glance or two, from across the way, as we ate at our respective tables. He seemed pensive and thoughtful … glancing around now and then, but focused on finishing his food. No doubt, he had a lot on his mind.

When I go to work, my primary concern is with being accurate, creative, and meeting deadlines. Others I know have to contend with customers’ wants and needs and moods, or with figuring the costs of a given project, or with the psyches and humors of children and their parents. Some stock shelves, others listen to patients, or write briefs, or hang cabinets. Etc.

Very few people I know go to work wondering if they’ll be dead in an hour, or by end of the day. Very few spouses I know “pray without ceasing” the way those of cops do, dreading every news bulletin, every ring of the phone, every unanswered text.

We hire police officers knowing bad people are all around us. Brutal people, savage people, plotting evil, swinging wild at the unpredictable circumstances of life. We don’t know how to handle those kinds of minds – we don’t want the danger, the frustration, the endless suspense, the senseless confrontations. So we pay people to take care of those things. And we leave them to it.

The police know most of us appreciate what they do, as long as we’re not the ones being pulled over and written up. But they also know – more and more, in the crazed current political climate – that they’re on their own.

We don’t pay them so we can brave the dangers with them. We pay them because they are willing to risk their lives, and we are not.

You’ve probably heard by now of what happened to Officers Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora, two Harlem policemen who answered a domestic disturbance call one Friday evening a couple of weeks ago. An elderly woman said her middle-aged son had threatened her. He was pouting in a back bedroom of her apartment. The two officers started down the long, narrow hall to get his side of it.

Suddenly the man filled the bedroom door, a gun in his hand, shooting and shooting and shooting. Rivera, just a year into the career he’d dreamed of all of his life – and three months into marriage with the girl he’d loved since grade school – died almost instantly. Mora died a few days later.

What went through their minds, as they started down that dark, cramped hallway?

Domestic disturbances are among the most dreaded of radio calls – they’re the ones that bring the surprises. Were the officers looking for the gun? Thinking on something the old woman said? Already filling out the paperwork on this incident in their heads?

Or maybe something on the wall of that hallway reminded them of a different moment, another person, a long-ago happening. Perhaps Ravera had a flickering thought of his pretty wife’s smile … of something she’d said as he walked out the door a few hours earlier.

Maybe they were braced for danger, maybe not. But they probably weren’t braced for eternity. No one starts down a hallway, expecting the face of God at the other end.

No one, including those of us who profess to expect God everywhere we turn. The call to faith, like so much of what Jesus says, is blunt and clear and unwavering. “Take up your cross daily and follow Me,” He says. And there’s no reason to take up a cross except to die on it. Indeed, no reason to follow Jesus … except to die on that cross.

And so, “I beseech you,” the Apostle Paul says, “by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.”

It may not seem especially reasonable to live one’s life answering calls to unforeseeable circumstances … stepping into dim-lit hallways, wondering what’s waiting in the dark ahead. But Officer Ravera, at least, was excited about it. He told family and friends that he saw being a cop as a way to reconcile the people of his community with those who enforce the law there.

Paul understood that. “We are ambassadors for Christ,” he wrote the Corinthians, “as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God.”

Christians, like police officers, are called to intercede in domestic disturbances – the unpredictable estrangements between a Father and His children. There’s no way to do that and stay entirely safe. And yet … we wake up every day embracing the curious conviction that bad things don’t happen to good people. As long as we stay out of those long, cramped corridors.

Only, “narrow is the road that leads to life,” Jesus says. And “only a few people find it.

“Where I go you know, and the way you know.”

Follow Him, and you can’t miss it. It's just down the hall.

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If, on your way, you should happen to pass a police officer, tell them, "Thank you." And smile.

Rest in peace, Officers Mora and Rivera.