DEEP WATERS

I've been thinking about one word a lot recently... LEGACY. My thoughts can be traced to a recent event in my life. This past week I spent time in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. I traveled home for my Uncle Alvis's funeral on this past Monday. His funeral was one of the most precious I've ever attended. The room was filled with people whose lives have been touched one way or another by Uncle Alvis. Family members, colleagues, neighbors, fellow church members -- we all crammed into his A.M.E. (African Methodist Episcopal) church home to reminisce and illuminate a life fully lived. My uncle spent his life serving college students as a professor in the School of Social Work at Howard University in Washington D.C. (my alma mater, by the way - HU!!!). As the president of Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina for a short time. As a member of the peace corps in Liberia, West Africa (which my family and I visited when I was only 4 years old). As a social activis...

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 life has been full of surprises. I'll share a few of them: I said I'd never marry a preacher. Well, I didn't marry a preacher, I married a corporate guy who, seven years later, became a preacher .  When my husband Anthony and I decided to adopt a newborn baby girl from the United States, the Lord chose a 2-year-old toddler  boy from Russia for our family instead. After relocating cross-country from Tennessee to Northern Virginia in hopes of planting a new church there, after only one year, the Lord clearly directed us to Mosaic Church of Central Arkansas . (Note: In case you haven't noticed, Arkansas borders Tennessee. Surely moving costs would have been a lot cheaper if we would have moved right to Arkansas from Tennessee.) As I share this list, I must admit, I wouldn't change not one of them. My life has been enriched by the surprises, the unexpected circumstances, and even the challenges of God flipping the script that I had joyfully wri...