DEEP WATERS

I will never forget the day I truly understood the significance of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. My family had just moved to Franklin, Tennessee and it was election day. I was talking with my mother on the phone, and we were discussing the elections in my new home in Tennessee and the elections in my native Baltimore, Maryland. Our conversation went something like this... "So who were you all voting for this time," my mother inquired. "Senators and City Council members, like us?" "Yeah, Senators, City Council, and some other positions too," I replied. "Oh, so did you already vote earlier?" "No, I didn't vote, Mom." My eyes watered as I fought an impending yawn. "We just moved here, and honestly, I don't know any of these folks running for office." A few seconds went by...  "Hello?" I glanced at the phone, wondering if she'd gotten disconnected. "I'm still here." Her to...

By the time I watched actress Lupita Nyong'o win an Oscar - after watching her dance with grace and confidence in the aisles, give host Ellen Degeneres a tube of her lipgloss and take part in the crazy Oscar selfie that actually crashed Twitter - I was already a huge fan. Her portrayal of Patsey, a slave woman in the critically-acclaimed and Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave  - which I blogged about here  in November of last year - was at once beautiful and haunting. It was a role that Lupita, with dual citizenship in Mexico and Kenya, was born for. She understands the meaning of "beautiful and haunting" first-hand. Her deep sense of Patsey's pain spoke through her portrayal, and I immediately wondered, "Who is this woman?" I screamed when screenwriter John Ridley won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. I screamed when the production team, including Director Steve McQueen, won Best Motion Picture. And I absolutely screamed when Lupita won an Oscar for...

Last night I completed my latest read, a book that I'd been hearing about for months - The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd , author of The Secret Life of Bees . This was a good read - a great one even. The Invention of Wings tells the story of Sarah Grimke, the daughter of Southern slaveowners in early nineteenth-century Charleston, South Carolina and Hetty, a.k.a. Handful, a slave girl owned by the Grimke family. On her eleventh birthday, Sarah receives a special gift from her parents - her very own slave girl. That girl is Handful. This story follows both women as they come of age in the early 1800's, as they share the sense of powerlessness they both feel as women, and for Handful, as an African American slave woman. We dip into the valley-lows with the women as they experience loss, betrayal, rejection, and paralyzing fear. But we also follow them to their mountain-highs as they embrace purpose, friendship, love and courage. We witness them finding their voic...

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....