James Baldwin reminds us that “the first duty of a human being is to assume the right to see.” Not to dominate. Not to control outcomes. Simply to see clearly and honestly. That duty is fragile and fierce. It can be taken away. It can be punished. And yet, it is the ground of all moral life.
What we are witnessing in our public square right now is a crisis of seeing. Journalists arrested for holding cameras. Legal observers are treated as threats. Witnesses labeled as criminals. The violence is not only physical; it is epistemic. It is an assault on shared reality. When those who document are detained, the message is unmistakable: do not trust your eyes. Look away. Let the story be told for you.
And still, people keep seeing.
They keep recording. They keep naming. They keep standing in the vulnerable space between power and truth, knowing full well the cost. This, too, is faith, not the soft faith of reassurance, but the costly faith of presence. The kind that refuses unreality even when unreality is being enforced. Another component of becoming a beloved community today.
Janet's former Bible Study group was well-named (forgive the pun) as "The Well". John’s Gospel for this upcoming Sunday understands this tension of presence deeply. It does not imagine belief as naïveté or certainty. It understands belief as something forged under pressure, shaped in the space between promise and proof. At the well, a woman risks being seen. On the road, a father risks trusting a word without evidence. Neither receives guarantees. Both receive life.
The royal official walks home carrying nothing but a sentence: “Your son will live.” No escort. No spectacle. No visible sign to shield him from doubt. He must decide whether the word is trustworthy before the outcome confirms it. This is not passive belief. It is active courage. It is choosing reality before it is safe to do so.
That same courage is required of us now. How do we insist on clarity when distortion is rewarded? To trust evidence when doubt is manufactured? Or refusing to remain silent when witnessing becomes dangerous?
The Gospel does not ask us to close our eyes. It asks us to open them wider and then to walk accordingly. Jesus never tells the woman at the well to ignore her thirst. He names it. Jesus never tells the official to stop fearing for his child. He meets him there. Faith, in John, is not the absence of fear; it is movement through fear toward trust.
And here is the quiet, radical hope threaded through both reflections: truth does not depend on spectacle to be real. The healing can happen at a distance. Life returns without witnesses. The Word is already at work before anyone can verify it. Likewise, clarity does not need amplification to be true. Reality does not need permission from power to exist.
Authoritarian systems depend on confusion, on isolation, on the slow erosion of confidence in one’s own perception. The Gospel offers something else: relationship, testimony, and shared seeing. Faith that ripples outward. Truth that flows like living water, finding its way through cracks no wall can fully seal.
So we keep seeing and witnessing. We keep trusting the Word that calls life forth, even when the road home feels long. Truth-telling is not extremism. Witnessing is not threat and clarity is not naïveté.
It is fidelity, to reality, to one another, and to the God who still meets us by wells, on roads, in courtrooms, in sanctuaries, and in the long walk between promise and fulfillment.
And still, the water flows.
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