I have spent much of my life trying to make sense of the place where I was raised. I have described the small community of Calcis, Alabama – located forty-five miles southeast of Birmingham – as a place that barely exists. People who drive through it seem unaware that anyone lives there. Even people who live nearby have never heard of it. And yet it has quite a story to tell.

Calcis is unlike the larger adjacent towns, Vincent and Harpersville, which abound with large fields that testify to the large-scale, plantation-style cotton cultivation that took place there over the generations. The soil in Calcis, for the most part, was no good for agriculture. Topographically, Calcis is very rocky – it is almost all ridges, hills, and steep valleys. The community came into being largely as a byproduct of the extraction of minerals used to make quicklime. Lime is made mostly of calcium oxide. The little community happened to be rich in calcium deposits – thus the name Calcis.

The community is shaped around this unique landscape and history. The small clusters of homes are situated along deep curves in the hillsides.

Perhaps crops did not grow as well in Calcis as in the places nearby, but a robust community bloomed out of the rocky soil. A church functioned as the community’s central node and gathering place. The preaching and teaching of the church cultivated the needed resource of faith, which enabled people to make sense of hard lives lived on hard soil. The church served not only a spiritual function; it was also the community’s primary social institution. Its calendar organized the lives of the community’s members and brought them into deeper fellowship and communication with one another. Growing up in Calcis meant that your life was inextricably interwoven with the lives of the people at the end of the curve, the bottom of the hill, or down the road. Perhaps this interconnection was one of the nutrients that made Calcis an ideal environment for the kinds of stories that come about when people live in such proximity – and the kinds of people who tell those stories best.

I heard a story once that completely changed my understanding of the place where I grew up and my understanding of what it means to live in community with others. I had always assumed that the people in this community had lived together in peace, but living in close proximity does not mean living in peace any more than living close to a church building means being closer to God.

I was sitting in the living room of the community’s matriarch and sage. She lived closer to the church at the center of the community than anyone, but she began her story by acknowledging the distance she had come in her walk with God:

I live near the church, but I have not always been as close to God as I am today. There are things that have happened in my life that brought me closer to God. When my daughter died, my closeness to God gave me comfort. I was so sad when she passed, and one day the Lord spoke to me clearly and said: “She wasn’t yours to keep. She was mine, and when I was ready for her, I brought her home to stay with me.”

But I remember a time when God and I were not so close. Years ago, my brother had an argument that ended with his murder. He was stabbed, and he died on the porch of our family home. As I tell you this story now, I can still see him bleeding and dying on the porch. I remember watching him die and knowing there was nothing I could do to keep him alive.

And we all knew who did it. She lived within walking distance from us. We sang in the choir together. I remember telling my husband that I was angry enough to kill her for what she did to my brother.

I understood her anger. Her brother was murdered. Her anger was a natural response. The reflex to want to serve as the arbiter of justice is so strong it can feel overwhelming. Yet anger is a duplicitous emotion. It often feels clarifying – it seems to sharpen our sense of right and wrong, of who is with us and who is against us. But anger can also deceive us. It muddies judgment. It can tempt us to respond in kind, and wound others as we have been wounded.

Sitting there, I keenly felt her loss. Reflecting on that story now, and the place where I first heard it, another feature of the landscape comes to mind: the quarries. Growing up, I heard a lot about the quarries.

There were multiple quarries deep in the woods that surrounded our little community, and as the years went by, the quarries seemed to move deeper into the woods. The generation who had swum in them as children was dying. The generation who had worked in them – or knew people who had – was gone. But the quarries and their legacy remained. It was a dark legacy. The large-scale mineral extraction that had given our community its name had been done with the use of African American convict labor. Yet the quarries did not come into being because of convict labor alone. Antipathy and avarice were pistons in the engine that had carved those chasms in the ground – and chasms into the people who held the picks and shovels.

What a quarry looks like is what loss feels like. To look at a quarry is to be overwhelmed by a vast vacuous space and confronted by the reality that what was taken out is gone forever and can never be replaced.

Yet there was far more than anger and loss to the story of the woman who sat before me. She continued:

My husband told me that I needed to pray and talk to God about my anger, and I did. I prayed and asked the Lord to fix it, and he did. But the Lord did more than that. He didn’t just take the anger away; he gave me something in its place. He showed me what he meant in his word where it says that he lets the wheat and the weeds grow together, and that at the end he will sort them out.

I remember the shock I felt as I heard for the first time about this crime which involved individuals and families I had known my entire life. I remember how it caused me to reorient my thinking about my community altogether. I had assumed that the peace I came to know there had always been there – but I was wrong. In the same way the community did not come into being without intention but instead had to be painstakingly negotiated around the ridges and curves, peace did not come without intention and also required painstaking negotiation. Peace was both learned and earned. Spasms of violence like the one in her story had left scars. The people in this little place had learned a great lesson: peace was the only way to maintain a community, and for peace to be enjoyed, it must be actively pursued.

The storyteller’s biblical commentary stirred two emotions within me. I felt relieved that in the midst of woundedness this person was able to find peace in the wisdom of scripture, and yet I felt conflicted. I was almost certain she was misreading Jesus’ parable:

The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.

The owner’s servants came to him and said, “Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?”

“An enemy did this,” he replied.

The servants asked him, “Do you want us to go and pull them up?”

“No,” he answered, “because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.” (Matt. 13:24–30)

I had spent a lot of time with this parable – teaching it and being taught it, preaching it and hearing it preached. I knew many passages in the Bible that could offer comfort for the wounded; this was not one of them. What comfort is there in being told there is no justice in this lifetime or, in fact, until the end of time?

I am not sure how best to explain what caused me to be able to see the great wisdom and insight that came from this woman’s story and her reading of scripture. Perhaps I grew spiritually and emotionally; perhaps I developed a better understanding of how it feels to wound and to be wounded. But for whatever reason, my relationship with that story – and the parable at its center – began to evolve. The person who wounded this woman was a neighbor. Being wounded by a neighbor always hurts more. Living in community presents as much an opportunity to do good as it does to do evil. God could have chosen to allow us to lead lives completely unaffected by evil people and their deeds – but he didn’t. Sometimes God allows evil to live next door and sing next to us in the choir.

This woman’s loss was profound, and while her anger was understandable, a decision made out of anger was not her ultimate response. When we have been wounded, we are confronted with a choice. We can give in to our anger. We can allow our wounds to become the justification for wounding others. We can allow our loss to become our life. Or we can look at life from the vantage point provided to us by our faith and see the greater truth that the wise woman shared with me. We can acknowledge the reality that the best medicine for our loss and woundedness can be found in the words of the Master, and that personal vengeance is an insufficient salve for wounds that only divine justice could heal.

God had given this once-wounded soul who shared her story with me something greater. He had given her time and grace to grow beyond her woundedness. In time, God healed her woundedness. Her healing did not erase the wound, but it transformed her understanding of her experience and deepened her knowledge of God. In the end, she taught me what she had learned: Our healer is greater than our wounds. And waiting on his justice makes all the difference here and now.