I’m preparing to preach tomorrow morning.  It’s always a challenge for me as preaching has much to do with sharing a word to help people face the uncertainties and ambiguities of life with faith, courage and hope.  That’s how I understand sharing the Gospel (Good News), anyway.

I find my self drawing inspiration from the many persons who have shared the “good news” with me and helped me carry on.  I can say in no uncertain terms that discovering the writings of James Baldwin while an undergraduate at Tennessee State University saved my life.

Thank you to the educators in my life!  Special shouts out to: Dr. William H. Hardy, Dr. Helen R. Houston, Dr. Samantha Morgan-Curtis,  Dr. Jacquelyn Grant, & Dr. Randall C. Bailey.  I hope I, too, can educate to help other young (and not so young) women and men live with their questions.

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“The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not.  To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.”  

From James Baldwin’s address, “The Negro Child – His Self Image,” delivered October 16, 1963.