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Author: Meredith Lovell Keseley
A few weeks ago I found myself serving on a jury in the DC Superior Court. After all of the evidence was presented in the trial, the judge sent the jury off to deliberate. It was about 11 o’clock in the morning. I walked into the deliberations confident that we would be finished before lunch.
The twelve jurors gathered around the conference table, picked a foreperson and took our first vote. I was shocked and, I might add, slightly alarmed, when the vote came back six guilty and six innocent. Suddenly being finished before lunch was no longer an option. Scenes from the movie Twelve Angry Men began to play in my head.
Not sure where to start, we began explaining our positions. The twelve of us in the room had come to very different conclusions even though we heard the same testimony and viewed the same evidence. After a few hours of deliberations, it was clear that we were deadlocked. No one had changed his or her mind. We had gone round and round. The same few points had been debated over and over again. Everyone made it clear that their mind was made up. We gave up trying to come to a consensus.
So, we sent the judge a note, we were called into the courtroom and our foreperson explained that we were deadlocked with no hope of a unanimous verdict. And then, the judge sent us back. He told us that we had not deliberated long enough, worked hard enough or completed our service to the court. Marching back to the jury room, we were not a happy group of people.
It got me thinking, though, about life outside of the courtroom. How many times do we give up too soon on things? How many times do we quit things prematurely? Maybe it is a relationship, a job or an academic degree program that just seems like too much work. Maybe we give up on personal goals and dreams before we have put enough work into them.
And then, God comes into the picture. God shows up as a judge. Not a strict and scary judge, mind you, but a gracious and loving judge. When we explain that we are ready to give up, God tells us that we need to deliberate longer. God suggests that we need to work harder. We are told that our service to God and to God’s people is not yet completed.
Why? I like to think that it is because God can see a bigger picture which we cannot see. God understands the ramifications of our decisions in ways that we do not. As God’s hands and feet in the world, God needs us to finish that which we have started because we are engaged in God’s work in the world.
It turned out that the courtroom judge was right. After many, many more hours of deliberation our jury reached a verdict. It involved the painstaking work of rereading multiple testimonies, dissecting evidence and having tough conversations with one another. Eventually, though, we reached a consensus. It was a good feeling to not just be done with something, but to actually finish something. We completed the task which we were called to do.
October 11th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Simply amazing, and now I can’t wait to have such an experience the next time I get the summons to serve in the mail. (rather than praying to avoid it)
How often we as Christians “throw our hands up” wishing that God would just undo the situations/challenges in our midst!
Instead we should seek to gracefully live through such growing pains* and upon looking back, and “lift up our hands” in praise!