A high school student in foster care had recently suffered the death of his mother, his only remaining family member. He was depressed and angry, and a rumor spread across his Los Angeles school last November that he was suicidal. The principal went to talk to him, but the boy kept his mouth shut and his expressions blank. So the principal called the police. While he was in class, police officers called him out, handcuffed him, and marched him down the hallway toward a police car. 

About two months ago, I interviewed a 55-year-old single woman who pastors a church in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Mexico. My interview with her didn’t make it into a story, but my interactions with her left a deep impression on me as my church begins praying about how to help the marginalized in our community.

On a recent Saturday, I didn’t speak to my husband for a whole day. Something had happened that triggered memories from our first year of dating, fanning a dusty cloud of hurts and wounds that I had assumed were long ago swept away. But no, there they were, settled in the dark corners of my heart, and all it took was one forceful blow to blast them out into the open. 

There’s a popular Korean saying that I always heard growing up: “You can’t spit at a smiling face.” I’ve never spat in anyone’s face before, smiling or scowling, but I did notice this: I can never seem to despise someone enjoying a popsicle. 

Every Monday for the last several months, single mother Alma Ruth crossed the border between Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico. The town is infamous for its violent cartel turf wars: The U.S. State Department issued the highest travel advisory (last updated Dec. 17, 2019) to that area for “crime and kidnapping,” which includes armed robberies, murder, sexual assaults, and extortion.

Jessi Green stood in the middle of hundreds of people gathered at Huntington Beach, Calif., holding a loudspeaker and a Bible, and broke into tears. She told a crowd of worshippers that police officers knocked on her door that day, July 24, to deliver a citation for holding a large public gathering without a permit. “There is a possibility of us getting arrested,” she said, voice breaking, “and I just felt that was such an honor. I just never thought something like that could happen in America.” 

I first learned about the “defund the police” movement, like many others, via social media—that place where everyone has a platform to post or repost very complex ideas into 280 characters or a square box. So when I saw people I follow call passionately for defunding the police—whether it’s outright abolishing them or diverting parts of their budgets to social services—what I saw wasn’t well-thought out ideas so much as a call to reimagine a better world.