DEEP WATERS

My first introduction to Maya Angelou was her 1969 memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings . I was a young teenage girl in Mrs. Simms English II class at Western High School in Baltimore, Maryland when I entered the world of this incredible woman - a world that began with pain and disadvantage. Many of us know the statuesque she-ro - the acclaimed poet, author, Civil Rights activist, actor, singer, friend and co-laborer with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. That was Maya Angelou. But she was also the little girl whose parents divorced when she was only 3-years-old. The young child who was then uprooted from her native St. Louis, Missouri and planted in small-town Stamp, Arkansas with her grandmother. The tender baby girl of eight who was raped by her mother's boyfriend and stripped of her innocence. She was also the courageous young child who exposed this crime and her assailant, revealing it to her family. The little girl who refused to speak for six whole years , a...

As promised in my last post, "Shame on Us: Overcoming Shame's Grip on Our Lives" , today I am posting a Part Two on the topic of shame. Part One focused on the research and thoughts of Dr. Brene Brown and her book The Gifts of Imperfection . Today, I want to share some spiritual insight. Earlier this month, I attended the annual conference of the Christian Alliance for Orphans (CAFO), a nonprofit organization that supports orphan care ministries and advocates throughout the U.S. and abroad. I thoroughly enjoyed the main speakers, workshops and the opportunity to serve on a multicultural panel on the topic of "Raising Children in a Multi-Ethnic Society."  Perhaps the biggest treat was a workshop I attended near the end of the conference, titled "Shame: Healing the Story of our Lives." Dr. Curt Thompson , a psychiatrist in Falls Church, Virginia, led this workshop examining shame and its effects on the human soul. He also revealed shame's...

I am an unapologetic fan of Dr. Brene Brown , writer and research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. The first time I heard Brene speak was at the Willow Creek Association's 2013 Global Leadership Summit . I loved her talk so much I even shared about it here in Deep Waters . Since then, I've heard Brene's popular TED Talks and read her book The Gifts of Imperfection . Brene is an expert on some interesting topics: vulnerability, courage, worthiness and shame . I want to camp out on this last topic today. Even before hearing Brene speak or reading any of her books, I was well-acquainted with shame. I couldn't have defined the word (I'll let her do that in a bit), but I knew shame when it came knocking on my front door. Shame is what I felt earlier this month when I was invited to open up a conference of almost 3000 orphan advocates with prayer. I was nervous and certainly second-guessed their choice to have me pray...

Yesterday the doors of the National September 11 Memorial Museum opened for the first time, welcoming President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle, along with families of 9/11 victims. This memorial, a 110,000 square foot exhibition built entirely underground, that runs through the 16 acre site known as "Ground Zero", holds within its walls memories of those who lost their lives that day.   On Wednesday, I watched an NBC Nightly News report featuring the museum and its director, Alice M. Greenwald. As my eyes took in the artifacts that tell the story of the tragedy of September 11 , 2001 , I was pulled into the horror once again. A hand rake used by workers to search for human remains Fragments of the aircrafts destroyed during the attack A pair of shoes that a survivor kicked off so she could escape the World Trade Center  A teddy bear collected from Ground Zero after a prayer vigil I wiped a tear as I remembered. I felt like 9/11 had happened yesterday....

The world is outraged.  I am outraged. Twitter and other social media outlets are ablaze with #Bringbackourgirls hashtags. On April 15*, the day we Americans were consumed with getting our taxes mailed out, more than 300 teenage girls were abducted from the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School in northeast Nigeria. Today, it's been reported that 8 more girls have been kidnapped. Like me, you may have wondered how so many girls could have been abducted at one time. According to USA Today , one of the reported 53 girls that escaped stated that the schoolgirls heard gunshots from a nearby town. Uniformed men posing as members of the Nigerian military arrived at the school, instructing the girls to go outside. These impostors were the kidnappers, members of an Islamic militant group named Boko Haram, which means "western education is a sin". Boko Haram's leader, Abubakar Shekau, has admitted to the abductions on video and declared the girls slaves. Accor...