A Home for Aliens.

The Founding Testament of Leave More Light

They made me feel like an alien.

Growing up in Haiti, I was a skinny little boy with freckles. In some neighborhoods, I was one of the only boys with freckles. In others, I was the only one. I stood out like a Christmas tree in the wrong season.

Some called me the son of a sea creature. Some asked whether somebody had shit on me while my mother was giving birth.

I wasn’t born hating my freckles. Somebody had to teach me.

So I rubbed charcoal on my face, hoping to make the rest of my skin match the spots. The kids laughed at that too.

Then I remembered watching my mother wash white clothes with bleach. If bleach could take dark spots out of cloth, maybe it could take them off my face.

I put bleach on a towel and scrubbed. It burned. I was scared. I reached for it again anyway.

The Woman Whose Name I Never Learned

An older woman caught me.

Another child had told her what I was doing, and she had been watching me. I tried to hide the towel. She asked what I was doing. I said nothing. She asked again. Still nothing. She said, “Let’s go find your mother.” I said no.

Finally, I told her the truth. I was trying to erase my freckles.

She looked at me and said, “You think you’re cursed because you don’t look like the rest of these fools? Half of them wish they stood out.”

Then she gave me a warning I have never forgotten. Don’t make a permanent decision about yourself because of a little neighborhood with barely four thousand people. You haven’t even seen how big the world is.

My freckles didn’t go anywhere that day. But for the first time, somebody told me the problem might not be my face at all.

I still don’t know her name. But I know what she gave me. Not money. Not a gift wrapped in paper. She gave me the greatest gift one human being can give another: the gift of change. She didn’t change my face. She changed the way I saw it.

But understanding something and being free from the pain that came before it are not always the same thing. That would take years.

A Joke to You. A Knife to Me.

When you make fun of somebody, you think you are telling them something they don’t already know.

You point. You laugh. You go home.

What you don’t know is that the person you laughed at may have spent the night before trying to make peace with the very thing you decided to ridicule. They might even laugh along with you. What else are they supposed to do? Sometimes people laugh because crying in front of the crowd would hurt even more.

Then they go home. And your joke goes home with them.

You forget what you said. They remember. Another joke. Another knife. Until the voice of the person who hurt them starts sounding like their own.

So when you tell me it was only a joke, I want to ask you something.

If the joke ended when you stopped laughing, why is somebody still hurting from it?

The Man Who Almost Finished the Job

I thank God I had people like that woman. I never reached the point of wanting to take my own life. But I did reach the point of trying to erase the face I had been given.

Not every child is that fortunate.

And I still wasn’t free. As a grown man, working and earning money, I wanted laser treatment to remove my freckles. Life had changed. But somewhere inside me, that little boy was still standing in front of a mirror with a towel in his hand.

Then I started questioning myself. Who am I without these freckles? Why am I still trying to satisfy people who don’t have to live inside my skin?

Why the hell am I letting a dead man tell me who I am?

I don’t mean somebody already buried. I mean somebody who, just like me, is going to die one day. The beautiful and the ugly. The rich and the poor. The admired and the forgotten. We are all walking toward the cemetery.

So tell me. What makes you more important than me? Will your beauty buy you another eternity? Will your money make your grave more alive than mine?

Even now, it isn’t simple. I have been self-conscious since I was a kid, and all the compliments I get as a grown man haven’t erased that completely. People admire my freckles now. Some tell me they wish they had them.

When somebody takes a picture with me, I usually say, “Let me see.” Sometimes, before I can even look, the other person is already staring at the screen. “Damn, you look beautiful. You’re handsome. I love your freckles.”

It makes me feel good. And at the same time, it takes me straight back to memory land, to the little boy who stood out like a Christmas tree in the wrong season.

When somebody says, “You’re beautiful, Junior,” I feel like a little girl with butterflies. And part of me wants to punch them in the face when all they want to talk about is my freckles.

Why can’t they just see me? Junior Pierre, the person. Why can’t somebody just say I’m handsome without adding anything else?

I go looking for the meaning behind the compliment, like I’m walking on thin ice. I know not everybody is out to get me. But when you’ve been on a battlefield too long, any noise can set you off. Even a good noise.

Sometimes I feel like a hypocrite, because some of these people truly love what they see. And a little voice inside me still asks: if I didn’t have these freckles, what would they say? Would that boy have been humiliated less? Would I be a different man today?

Those freckles were never evidence that something had gone wrong. They were part of my face. Part of my story. And the little boy who scrubbed them with bleach deserved better than growing into a man who finished the job.

He deserved to be loved. Especially by me.

The Home I Wanted to Build

If I am an alien, why don’t I build a home for other aliens?

Leave More Light is that home. Through ministry, books, preaching, and the way we treat one another, I want it to become a place where the outcast, the lonely, and the overlooked can finally know what belonging feels like.

A place to meet love, if you have never known what love is.

A place where people believe in you before you can believe in yourself, the way that woman believed in me.

You don’t have to shrink yourself to fit here. You don’t have to leave part of yourself outside the door. Your whole self can come in.

Bring the parts of yourself the world taught you to hide. Your pain will not be our entertainment. Your difference will not be a reason for us to humiliate you. You can be yourself, and be beautiful in every way you already are.

And a place where love meets hate and asks one question: what is so good about hating, when it causes you more harm than good?

Love With a Backbone

If you have never known what love feels like, I want meeting me to become one of your definitions of love.

Not because I am perfect. Because somebody once did that for me.

If you have never been treated with kindness, let me be kind to you. If you have never had somebody listen without turning your pain into a joke, let me listen. If you have spent your life being called strange, come meet another strange human being. We might even laugh about it.

You were worthy of love before anybody decided whether you were beautiful.

But love has to be more than a beautiful speech. I mean love that speaks up when somebody is being humiliated. Love that notices the person everybody keeps overlooking. Love with enough backbone to tell a cruel person to stop, and enough tenderness to sit beside the person who was hurt.

And yes, I want the cruel person to change, too. The gift of change is not only for the wounded. Sometimes the person who needs to change most is the one doing the hurting. You cannot take back every word you have spoken. But you can stop adding new wounds. And maybe one day the person whose laughter once made somebody feel small will be the one who stands up when everybody else starts laughing.

I cannot change the whole world by myself. But maybe I can change somebody’s world. And maybe that somebody will change another.

To the Little Boy I Used to Be

I wish I could tell that little boy with the towel something.

My little brother, there is nothing wrong with your face. You were never a mistake.

I cannot go back and take that towel out of his hand. But I can decide what happens to the love that survived inside him. I can give it away.

That woman never told me her name. She just stopped a child from hurting himself and told him the world was bigger than the people laughing at him.

That is the gift of change. Not changing your face. Not changing your skin. Changing the way you see the human being looking back at you, so you can walk toward a better future.

I want to be her for somebody.

They made me feel like an alien. So I decided to build a home for aliens.

My beautiful brother, my beautiful sister: there is room for you here. Come as you are.

And when you have found a little warmth, help somebody else who is still standing in the cold.

Leave More Light. Leave Less Harm.

— Junior Pierre

Author’s note: Events and dialogue are recounted or reconstructed from the author’s own memory and experience.