I Love a Parade!

Author Donald Miller talks about his friend Bob.  Bob’s a lawyer, who also has served in the diplomatic corps, serving in Uganda.  Over the years he has developed a real love for that African country, and has often helped in efforts to improve living conditions in that impoverished land.

 

Stateside, Bob and his family live in San Diego.  One New Year’s Day some of Bob’s kids complained that they were bored.  So they decided to figure out a way to spice up the day.  They kicked around several ideas, including buying a pony or building a rocket ship.  Leave it to kids to imagine such a thing!  But then one of the children suggested they have a parade.

 

While at first glance it seemed just as unlikely as the rocket ship, the more they thought about it the more they realized it might work!  It might be a lot of fun.

 

They decided they’d all make a costume, and get some balloons, and invite the neighbors to join in the fun.  The kids ran up and down the block, inviting their friends and neighbors to join them.  Not on the sidelines, oh no.  This wasn’t a parade for just watching.  No they invited folks to be in the parade.  They’d all march down the street together, with their costumes and balloons, and then they’d finish up at Bob’s and have a barbeque.

 

Everyone had a ball.  In fact they had so much fun they decided to do it again the following year.  And the next, and the next and the next.  It’s gotten so big now, that literally hundreds participate every year.  Some folks who’ve moved even fly back to San Diego to join in the fun.  One year the neighborhood mailman was the grand marshal—and as he led the parade, he threw envelopes in the air.  They always elect a parade queen—some have come from the local retirement home.  And the queen gives a speech at the brunch they have after the march.  And everybody marches.  Nobody’s left out.  Nobody sits on the curb.   (A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, passim)

 

But that’s San Diego, that’s New Year’s Day.  What about the rest of the year, and the rest of the world?    For there have always been folks shut out of the parade.  But there have also been drum majors who ahve called a different tune.  When the poor were called unworthy of God’s love, Francis of Assisi took up the baton and made a place for them in the procession.  When women were excluded on the grounds of their gender, when the forces of apartheid in South Africa and racism in America said whites only, folks like Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King offered up a new song for marching.  When women were excluded on the basis of gender, when Irish Catholics were told they need not apply, when the Soviets tried to shut down the church, whenever there has been oppression, whenever there have been folks who’ve tried to keep the people on the curb, there have always been people of faith who have said, “No!  The parade is for one and all!”