Isaac S. Villegas is pastor at Chapel Hill (N.C.) Mennonite Fellowship. This post originally appeared in the December issue of The Mennonite magazine. For more columns, features and news, read the full issue. This piece includes profanity that is partly censored, but used to reflect the actual events and language used. 

On election night, at a college in New York, in a dorm room elevator, a black baby doll is hung from a noose.

In Indiana, an African-American woman strolls down the sidewalk. White men slow their truck, rolling down a window. “F*** you n****r b***h,” they yell at the woman. “Trump is going to deport you back to Africa.”

In Utah, two white kindergartners tease their Latino schoolmate in the playground. “We voted for Trump,” they say, smiling and playing. “And that means you’re going to be sent to a new school, in Mexico.”

In Walmart, a white woman walks up to someone wearing a hijab and rips it off, saying, “This is not allowed anymore.”

In Pennsylvania, on a subway, a group of white men see a woman in a dress—and one man calls out, “Grab her by the p***y!” as another reaches for her.

In California, late at night, a white man, guzzling his beer, walks toward a group of gay men and shatters the empty bottle across one of their faces, shouting, “We’ve got a new president, you f*****g f*****s!”

In New Jersey, after buying groceries at the store, a mother buckles her two babies in their car seats. A white man, watching from his parked car, shouts at her. “Take your little chinklets, and go back to where you came from. It’s Trump Nation now.”

In New York City, in Times Square, a white man bumps into a black woman. “Watch where you going n****r,” he says, scowling at her, then grins. “You’re gonna be working in my fields pretty soon, because my man Trump owns you now.”

In North Carolina, where I live, the Ku Klux Klan announces plans for a rally on Dec. 3 to celebrate the election of Donald Trump, whom they herald as the president who will restore the supremacy of whiteness. “We are not hateful people as our enemies would have you believe,” the KKK explains as they plan their event. “We are common white people from all walks of life.”

Down the street from where our church meets for worship, a Latino boy walks to school and a white man pulls over his car, rolls down the window, and yells at the child. “Hey, kid,” he points at the fourth-grader. “We get to send you back now, wetback.”

Up the hill from my house, in a neighborhood next to ours, a concrete wall is tagged with graffiti: “Black lives don’t matter and neither does your votes.”

At church small group, a friend who teaches junior high tells me about his students, black and brown girls and boys, all of them scared and crying, fearful of the brazen racism that has been unleashed in the national affirmation of a Trump presidency. “What do I tell them tomorrow?” he asks me.

This morning I talk with a friend—a U.S. citizen, a Pakistani Muslim. I tell him I’ve been praying for his safety, for him and his family, his wife and child. In a town where most people are white, in a society where whiteness has become a rallying cry for bigotry, fear shrouds the life of his family. Like the Klansman’s cloak, underneath someone’s white skin may be hidden the xenophobic ideology that empowered multitudes to admire Trump’s racist rhetoric.

“As a Muslim American,” I ask my friend, “what are you praying for these days?”

“As the Qur’an says,” he responds to me, “Allah does not burden a soul beyond what it can bear.” Then he recites a passage from Surah Al-Baqarah: “Our Lord, burden us not with what we have no ability to bear. And pardon us and forgive us and have mercy upon us.” And I tell him that his holy text reminds me of the apostle Paul, from a letter to the church in Corinth, where he explained that God would not let us be tested beyond what we can bear, that God will show us how to endure.

“That will be my prayer for you,” I tell him, “that this moment in our society will not test you beyond what you can bear, that God will sustain your family.”

After I hang up the phone, he texts me a picture of his 2-year-old daughter—her face glowing: bright eyes, chubby cheeks, exuberant smile. Violence shrouds this country during Christmas, a threat of violence that some of us feel more than others.

Mary and Joseph knew this fear, as they survived Herod and his supporters, his mobs who menaced society with threats, with death. This world feels unbearable, as I imagine it felt for Mary. And, like Mary, if there’s any hope, it will involve our labor, our struggle—pushing new life into a world that hates her life. Christmas hope is travail, screaming in the night, crying out for the promise of life in a terrifying world.

This “Opinions” section of our website provides a forum for the voices within Mennonite Church USA and related Anabaptist-Mennonite voices. The views expressed do not necessarily represent the official positions of The Mennonite, the board for The Mennonite, Inc., or Mennonite Church USA.