Consistency Now Carries Us Later
When it comes to infamous cities, places that you might not want your wife and kids to vacation without you, I doubt you would have to reference the annual Most Dangerous Cities in America column of Newsweek.
Maybe Chicago, St. Louis, or Detroit. Memphis and New Orleans might even make the list depending on your affinity for barbecue or Bourbon street.
That’s today though. In the 80’s the city of Miami was as safe a bet for unlawful activity as Hulk Hogan was for supremacy of the W.W.F. And like the Hulkster, its influence hangs around decades later. Even still, remnants of trafficking and narcotics rackets run rampant in this part of Florida.
Oddly enough though, Miami’s reputation of drug influenced danger would have been unimaginable just 10 years prior when it would have more accurately been described as a struggling, sleepy, southern town.
But in the early 80’s drug consumption changed, which made Miami’s cocaine culture a major institution almost overnight. Millions and millions of dollars filled Miami’s banks at a rate in which their systems could not account for.
As you might predict, it didn’t take long before both the city's banking and criminal justice departments were blatantly corrupt. It was a bad situation. But then it got worse.
Around the same time, Castro opened the borders of neighboring Cuba causing a mass exodus in which 125,000 people were cannonballed on top of Miami’s population of just over 300,000 people. Beautiful metaphors of melting pots aside, this was catastrophic to a city whose key institutions were already so undermined.
Now Miami, under the influence of opulence and overindulgence, is also shockingly overpopulated. It doesn’t take much imagination to play this wreckage forward. Ultimately, it would take decades for the city to recover.
Maybe the most interesting part of this saga of a city is the way people’s fingers tended to point south as they cast blame for why they ultimately moved out of town. It was widely believed that it was their new Cuban neighbors who had ruined the city they once called home.
But that just wasn’t true. Immigration is a nuanced issue, but in this case cocaine had secured a foothold in Miami for a very long time. Its banking and criminal justice systems were not set up for success. Yes, the influx of population didn’t help, but Miami was never going to thrive.
I can’t help but draw a perfect parallel to the stories that we hear so often in our community. I can even see the same pattern clearly within myself.
I choose to focus on an event rather than on the way I allowed my life to evolve over the years. I look for someone outside myself to blame rather than turning inward and observing the life I have chosen to live up until that point. I look at my life falling apart and choose to define it by a day rather than all those days leading up to it.
The truth is that life is not fantasy. Unexpected events will take place that are completely outside of our authority. But if our personal systems for spiritual health have not been set up to handle such an incident, then aren’t we the ones to blame?
We would do well to consider our lives, in some ways, like a city. Responsible for its own order and operations, but undoubtedly able to be affected by outside forces. If our infrastructure is already suspect, then we will never survive an unexpected storm.
I would imagine that is why we see Paul writing to the Galatians to encourage a consistent (key word) Christlike existence:
Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.
Galatians 6:8-9 (NIV)
My hope is that each man represented by the Hangar is building a foundation for life that is full of the truth of scripture, faith in Jesus, and community that they are accountable to. That they would have a system made strong by these things so that when unexpected hardships inevitably happen they aren’t derailed for decades like the example we learned about today.
Consistency now carries us through catastrophe later. May consistent growth be our calling card as we go forward.
