LETTER TO THE EDITOR: KNOWING THAT OUR OPINIONS ARE HEARD IS COMFORTING

Last Tuesday I was on foreign ground. I attended my first school board meeting and spoke to an issue confronting our community. The opportunity to speak and share opinions, however strongly felt or wrongly articulated, is a great privilege of this country.

I am grateful for the freedom of speech and public forums. Little did I know the evening held three surprising moments of personal growth for me.

The first moment came in a side conversation. A lawyer called me to task on a generalized statement I made out of ignorance. He called it a cheap shot because I didn't know him personally. He was correct, and I regret making that comment. I apologized, and he graciously accepted my apology.

A different conversation with another lawyer yielded yet another revealing moment. He felt the frustration of the crowd was misplaced. As we vented, fumed, ranted, griped, complained and poured our wrath out upon the school board members, he felt our frustration should have been directed at the juvenile system.

If the juvenile system had meted out a less lenient form of justice, the lawyer presumed, the school board would have had some of their work done for them with respect to rules of eligibility. Since the juvenile system didn't respond accordingly, the community looked to the school board to something the school board said it couldn't do, according to their legal counsel.

The experience for me was painfully frustrating. There are many complications and complexities that will never get solved. There are private issues that cannot be addressed in open forum. I still believe that if doing the right thing challenges the legal system, then we need to do what is right and accept that challenge. Right or wrong, that's my opinion.

The members of the school board patiently listened, graciously receiving the heated comments from 40 other people who spoke more articulately than me. Promises of new guidelines came out of the meeting, and it's a start on something positive. But there were many more issues to address.

I stayed until the very end of the meeting. The drive home at 11:45 p.m. provided me with the third surprise. Driving along the lonely highway, I recalled how several Psalms are nothing more than the rantings of an angry person upset with the injustices of the world. Many Psalms are raw emotions, unrestrained anger and pure lament. Some of the psalmist's complaints have no justifiable basis, but still God listens. God always listens.

I recently watched the movie, "The Apostle." In one scene, the character played by Robert Duvall stays up all night haranguing at God, complaining about the way things are and griping about how they should be. Interestingly, God listens, but nothing changes.

Tuesday night we vented and harangued. The school board members said there were some things that they could not, and would not, change. But at least they gave us the courtesy and the respect to be heard. In this great nation, we always have that right to speak and be heard.

Read Psalms 22, 77 and 88. Can you feel the pain and frustration that the psalmist expresses? Can you sense his confidence that as he's talking, God is listening? Note that, even though nothing changes, the venting process eventually produces a sense of hope by the end of the Psalm. If God listens, then we know we always have hope.

Perhaps this hope comes from knowing that, even though nothing materially changes in the foreseeable future, God hears us. If God hears us, then we know God cares. God cares enough to patiently listen, and he gives us the courtesy of expressing our most inner feelings of frustration, even when I take the cheap shots and blame God for my mistakes.

Grant Gillard,

Jackson