Photo: Luke Hartman, vice president of enrollment at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va., recently published a reflection on the Sojourners blog about his friendship with former South Carolina deputy Ben Fields, who was fired after assaulting a black student in a high school classroom. In the essay, Hartman tries to reconcile what he knows about Fields with the violence of his actions, and concludes with thoughts on reconciliation and personal responsibility. (Photo by Michael Sheeler)

When a person you know well makes a regrettable choice, how do you reconcile what you know about that person with his or her actions? And how do you share what you know about this person without excusing the action?

These questions immediately confronted Luke Hartman, vice president of enrollment at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va., when he saw the footage on national news of resource officer Ben Fields flipping over a black student’s desk and tossing her across the classroom in a South Carolina high school. [Fields was subsequently dimissed.]

In an essay published on the Sojourners website and co-written with Sheri Bailey, Hartman grapples with what he calls an “existential crisis,” caught between his knowledge of Fields as a person and his anger at yet another violent mistreatment of a black person. (Hartman is, he says, a “passionate advocate of the Black Lives Matter movement;” read more about his involvement on campus here.)

Hartman was once Fields’ basketball coach at Hesston (Kan.) College. Coach and athlete stayed in touch after Fields graduated, moved to South Carolina and joined the law enforcement profession. On vacation, Hartman and his family stopped to visit him.

The footage of the incident immediately made Fields, in the judgement of the nation, Hartman writes, “a bigoted, violent, white police officer, his name added to the long and growing list of racist public servants.”

In the essay, Hartman recounts how he reached out to Fields and how former members of the basketball team also connected with their coach to share the news “and ask if he was OK.”

One of them, Arnold McCrary, responded with similar puzzlement in an email to Hartman, calling Ben Fields “my brother” and a man “with the biggest heart” who was sensitive to racial inequality.

“I’m trying to understand how to know him as we do and make sense of the video,” McCrary writes.

A public school teacher and administrator before coming to EMU, Hartman brings to this essay years of experience working with exceptional learners and students with behavioral needs in middle and high schools.

Regardless of the instigation, physical assault was never an acceptable response in this situation, he says, nor is it the one that God expects of us. He concludes with the hope that Fields will make efforts towards “reconciliation and personal responsibility.”

“We each are on a perpetual search for that path to becoming who God created us to be,” Hartman says. “And sometimes when we fall down or are knocked off the path we must continue to ask—what is the path back?”