“The one who has knowledge restrains his words, and one who keeps a cool head is a person of understanding.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We never know what tomorrow will bring. Sure, we have our predictions, and sometimes those predictions are fairly reliable because of a consistent pattern in the past. But we don’t really know. Sometimes things go like we expect. Sometimes we find ourselves treading through territory we could have never imagined we would have to navigate. Had you asked anyone in my town a year ago what the state of things would be today, they would probably not have guessed they would be where they are right now. Things have been a bit…unsettled of late. Let’s talk today about why as well as some things we should keep in mind when thinking about it or responding to it.

As I mentioned a moment ago, things in the town where I live have been a bit unsettled of late. Actually, that’s probably not strong enough of a word to aptly capture the situation. The tension generated by recent events has been thick enough that you almost need a chainsaw to get through it, and there doesn’t appear to be a near-term end to it. The focus of the drama has been the relationship between the town’s leadership and the local police department that will no longer exist starting on Monday. Starting about a year ago a relationship that at least on the surface was once very strong and pretty harmonious began to publicly decay. While it wasn’t a straight downward slide, once the decay set in it gradually worsened in waves to the point where have now arrived.

The reasons for the decay are complicated and I doubt very much there are many people who know anything like the full story behind it all. And I am not included in that small group. My own placement in the mess, though, has been interesting. Besides being a citizen who tries to be fairly involved in the goings on of my community, I’m the pastor of the First Baptist Church. That may not sound like it should mean very much, but given the cultural role filled by First Baptist Churches over the span of the last 100 years or so in American culture, it means more than it sounds. I count several of the individuals who have been involved right in the heart of the controversy and on every possible side as members or otherwise involved in the church, and it has been my job to be a pastor to all of them fairly and impartially. For the last several years, I have also been the chaplain for the police department and have had the pleasure of getting to minister to our LEOs and their families including through all of this.

As a citizen, I have opinions on how things have been handled and the decisions that have been made. As a pastor, I have the responsibility to set those to the side and give impartial, biblically rooted counsel when asked and, more importantly, to show the love of Christ equally to everyone with whom I come into contact. As a pastor and citizen, I have a passion for my community. I want to see it grow and thrive and remain the kind of place where I am glad to be able to raise my children. Oakboro is a unique community. It exists in a bubble of some of the best things from our culture’s past while intentionally striving to lean forward so that it does not get consumed by the past and fade into irrelevance. I want to see that balance preserved. Maintaining that balance and continuing to grow more fully into the dynamic, vibrant community we can be cannot happen amidst a divided and angry citizenry.

So, if I may, allow me to be a pastor for just a minute.

If you have faced the journey of a loved one in the grip of a terminal diagnosis, you know there are a whole variety of emotions that are a part of the process. It’s a bit – and sometimes a lot – of a rollercoaster. And at the journey’s end, there is grief and mourning. That’s something like what the community of Oakboro has been through over the last year. The relationship between the town leadership and the police department has been overwhelmingly positive for a very long time. While there are folks in town who can certainly remember when that wasn’t always the case, the last several years during which time the town has grown tremendously things have been mostly very good. Then things seemed to change fairly suddenly.

While we typically associate grief with seasons in which we have lost loved ones, it is actually a natural human response to change. Well, this change in the relationship between the town and the police department has caused the whole community to enter into a season of grief. Different people handle grief in different ways and not all of them are positive. What’s more, this grief has come in waves. There were bubbles of it early on in the process, but there have also been great waves of it such as when nearly three quarters of the department all turned in their resignations on the same day. Then the officer who served as our local school’s SRO resigned leaving that position and the presence of an SRO in limbo for several weeks. Then our longtime Chief resigned. Then the town leadership narrowly voted against shutting down the department and contracting with the local sheriff’s office to provide public safety coverage for the town.

Then, like a cancer patient nearing the end of her life having a bit of a rally that gives false hope to her family members, the town resolved the SRO question for the school and voted to begin searching for a new Chief of Police, giving the appearance that things were settling down. Only a couple of weeks later, though, the town once again took up the vote to disband the department and contract with the sheriff’s office. This came in conjunction with the remaining officers all tendering their resignations. And with that, over the next couple of weeks, the 109-year-old police department will be phased out and then gone, with all town’s public safety operations being handed over to the Sheriff’s Office.

That’s a lot of change in a very short amount of time. Rather unexpectedly, the community is grieving over it. For better or for worse, many of the efforts to process this grief have taken place on social media. While I have not commented personally on any of these feeds (and don’t plan to), I have tried to stay abreast of most of them. People have handled their grief in all sorts of different ways there. Some of it has manifested as anger. Some as sadness. Some as calls to action both for the departing police officers, some of whom will find themselves without employment on Monday, and against current town leadership with November’s election fully in view. Some have defended the decision. Some have blistered it. Some have sought to be a voice of reason generating both reasonable and less reasonable responses. Some have posed questions to gain information. Some have posed questions in such a way as to allege nefarious intent or unacceptably secretive actions. And the interactions among all of these different voices have fallen out in a whole variety of ways. Some of them have been convicted but civil. Others less so.

Can we call all of this what it is? These are all various expressions of grief in one of its five stages from people who are processing their grief journeys. The odds are good that if you are a citizen of Oakboro, you are going through your own journey of grief as well. That’s okay. It’s normal and healthy to be doing that in this kind of a season. This is a season that hasn’t been easy for anyone involved in it or otherwise affected by it including the general town population.

As we continue forward together, here are a few things to keep in mind that may help to draw us back to a place of unity as a community. First, what Solomon wrote in the proverb at the top of this post is worth heeding. Keeping a cool head and restraining your words will almost always result in a better outcome of the situation you are in than the alternative. This applies in person. This really applies on social media. If you are typing up a post in response to one that left you irritated at the obvious cluelessness or idiocy or mean-spiritedness it demonstrated, ask yourself a couple of questions before you hit send.

Is this going to healthily advance a reasonable and productive conversation about this particular issue? Do I have enough genuine facts that I am able to contribute meaningfully to the matter, or am I just firing off my own opinion about it? Having opinions is fine. Confusing opinions for facts is not. Am I writing this in order to correct another person’s thinking? Does that person really need to be corrected? Am I really the one who needs to do that job? Says who? If I offer this correction, is it going to accomplish anything? Is there any chance the tone of my post could be construed in a way that leaves me coming across cluelessly, idiotically, or mean-spiritedly? If I hit delete on everything I just wrote, will there be any lastingly negative outcomes? Is this something I would be willing to communicate face to face with this other person? Would it be better for me to seek out that opportunity rather than contributing to the noise on social media?

If you go through all of those questions, and your post still seems reasonable and right to make, first, go ask someone else to get a second opinion (and preferably someone else you trust not to simply rubber stamp your ideas). If they are in agreement, then you can consider posting it. But, honestly, you’re probably better off deleting it anyway. Remember: the one who has knowledge restrains his words. It’s the people who don’t have any knowledge who are glad to sail the seas of verbosity with abandon. It should perhaps not be lost on us that the people who are the most centrally involved in everything that has happened have shared the fewest words about it. You may not like that fact, but Solomon wasn’t led by God to make this observation for nothing.

Second, everyone involved in this whole mess loves this community. They may have a different vision for how the community should operate, but they all love it. They want to see this community thrive just as much as you do. And because all the people involved love this community, none of the decisions anyone has made in relation to this have been easy to make. Nor have they been made lightly. Rather than turning to anger or resentment, consider seeking them out personally with a spirit of gentleness and humility to try to understand why they have made the decisions they have made. Simply being angry about it (especially on social media) won’t really make you feel any better, and it won’t do anything positive to help move the community through its process of grieving.

Third, there are many folks who are hurting because of the decisions that have been made. Some of them are hurting, and there really aren’t any good or helpful avenues for them to be able to healthily process that hurt. These folks need our support. They need prayer support. They need the support of encouragement and kindness. They may need material support. That being said, simply throwing material support at a problem because it makes you feel better and like you are doing something may not actually be the most helpful thing you can do. It is far wiser to first confirm whether or not material support is needed, what kind and how much material support is needed, and where precisely that material support needs to go before moving forward on any kind of a project like that. Simply throwing money at a problem rarely brings meaningful resolution to it.

Some of the folks who are hurting because of all of this, though, aren’t the folks you might naturally expect. Making the kinds of decisions that have been made – whether you agree with them or not – is not easy. The people making them don’t make them lightly. And when the decisions prove deeply unpopular with the community, these folks get blasted. You may or may not be familiar with that experience, but it’s no fun to get blasted for an unpopular decision you have made as a public leader. Now, it comes with the territory, and so there shouldn’t be too much in the way of surprise at negative reactions, but that only makes them slightly less difficult to bear. What’s more, some of those negative reactions get aimed at more than just the ones making the hard decisions including at their family members. The result of this is stress on top of stress on top of more stress. That’s not a load we should wish on anyone, and whether or not you agree with the decisions that have been made, it is not a load that you should contribute to without first carefully considering how you would feel in their position (and simply arguing that you wouldn’t have made the decision in the first place doesn’t cut it here).

I am convinced that Oakboro is a community that is poised to thrive in a big way. I see it each week in the great and exciting things God is doing in my own church community which happens to be right at the heart of this town. A divided community, however, cannot thrive. We are not all going to agree, much less like, all the decisions that are made in the effort to lead this town to a place of thriving for as many of its citizens as is possible. But if we will commit to walking paths of forgiveness, intentional understanding, conversations that are both convictional but also charitable, and a whole lot less complaining on social media, we will continue to move forward together. If you are a follower of Jesus, your steady application of the character of Christ in all these matters will have a big impact. Don’t lose sight of that. Let’s keep growing together.