I remember seeing Steven Johns-Boehme after 9/11. The world was still pretty shaken up. I’d just started as pastor at a new church, and Steven (who was an associate Regional Minister) came over to make sure I was getting along all right.

He walked through the door of the church. I stuck out my hand and said, “Hey Steven, how’re you doing?”

Somehow the question seemed to catch him off guard, because he stopped, thought about it for a beat, and said, “Pretty good for a world where people fly planes into buildings.”

I thought about those words the other day, as I was getting ready to go out Friday evening. I’d told Susan I would go with her to help feed the animals at the Tribe animal sanctuary. And I was putting my boots on when I heard about the not-guilty verdict that came back in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Maybe you heard about it too. It was minor story, hardly covered by the press.

Anyway, to recap: a 17 year-old White kid from Illinois brought an illegally obtained AR-15 across state lines to Kenosha, Wisconsin to a charged protest over the shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, two days earlier by the police. While there Rittenhouse shot and killed two men, wounding a third. After a trial in front of a—how shall I put this—judge who repeatedly demonstrated his partiality, Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted.

As I turned on the news and scrolled through Twitter, I was struck by the level of anger and grief on the part of those who fear this verdict signals a green light to copycat killers. These people—having increasingly been given permission over the past five years—take their extensively curated sense of White grievance and wear it as a badge of honor and patriotism. They then use this sense of having suffered some sort of profound indignity as an excuse to make sure Black people “remember their place.”

After the verdict came back, the sense of outrage and lamentation was palpable by those who wanted only to see Kyle Rittenhouse answer for what he did. I can’t tell you how many people were quick to point out the reality we all know to be true that if the tables had been turned and a Black youth with an assault rifle traveled to another state and killed two people and wounded another, that that young man—if he lived through the initial police encounter—would be serving the second day of a life sentence today.

But what I found even more chilling was the observation that for many of our Black siblings, the most painful part of Friday wasn’t the “not-guilty” verdict—because they have no illusions about whether a White man will be held accountable for killing people in a racially charged atmosphere; it was the reaction of glee and pride on the part of so many White people that Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted. Outraged by the acquittal, these people are certain that because of his new notoriety and quasi-hero status to, Kyle Rittenhouse is going to have a gold-plated future. There were two congresspeople who said they would arm wrestle over the chance to give this young vigilante a congressional internship.

But the fact that this he’s been made into an icon for a whole segment of our society, means that there are lot of people who are way more afraid for their lives and the lives of their children today than they were yesterday.

The irony, of course, is that the people who are cheering on this pitiable young man claim that the reason they’re so wedded to guns and the idea that they should be able to carry them anywhere (even Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta, apparently), is because they’re afraid of rising crime. Interestingly enough, these same people don’t appear to be afraid of crimes committed by White supremacists brandishing assault weapons—only crimes that involve People of Color.

Now, I don’t want to make fun of anybody’s fear. Far from it. Fear is a very real thing, and we can’t just stop being afraid because somebody tells us to.

On the other hand, the definition of courage isn’t a lack of fear, it’s doing the right thing in spite of your fear.

Fred Craddock tells the story about the time when his wife, Nettie, went away for the weekend and he was left to fend for himself. Having been left in charge of cooking his own meals, he went to the store to pick up some supplies.

Not entirely sure where everything was, he saw a woman with a child in her cart and he called to her, “Excuse me, ma’am, could you tell me where I can find the peanut butter?”

The woman placed her hand on the child’s shoulder, and her eyes began darting up and down the aisle to see if she was alone with this stranger. Not seeing anyone else she turned her back hurried toward the other end of the aisle, clutching her purse in one hand and her child in the other. As she reached the end of the row, she looked back over her shoulder, and then she was gone.

Puzzled, and extremely self-conscious, Fred kept looking for the peanut butter. After some time, he finally found were it was located and pulled a jar off the shelf. Just then, the woman and her child turned down the aisle and saw him putting the jar in his cart.

“Oh, you really were looking for the peanut butter,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Well, you can’t be too careful these days,” she said with a shrug.

He turned to face her and said, “Oh yes, lady, you can.”