Locs, Heels, and the Bible

Pastors are human beings and we gather stories the way chalices gather the fruit of the vine - in pours. The cup is beautiful, yes. However, it gets heavy. We do grieve more than we admit. We grieve the saints whose funerals we preside over. We grieve when members leave, sometimes with words that bruise, sometimes with silence that lingers. We grieve colleagues who retire, because their absence rearranges the hallways, the Zoom room, and the denominational map. We grieve the ministry plans that were not approved by the committee, the initiatives that ran out of volunteers, and we are not immune to the shifting ground. In addition, we carry our own private griefs.  Grief in ministry is part of the road. Scripture is honest about this. Israel sang laments in public. Jesus wept at a friend’s tomb and lamented over a city that would not listen. Jeremiah ’s tears watered the pages of prophecy. Paul writes of being “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing,” and the Psalms teach us to bring both...

Dear Arleigh,  Another year has come, and still my heart struggles to comprehend the weight of your absence. The world has the audacity and insensitivity to move on. The days fold into weeks, weeks fold into months, and here we are six flipping years later. My spirit carries the ache of you being gone every single day. Today especially, I feel the sharp edges of missing you, as though all that time has not dulled them at all. I still remember your laugh and how it could fill a room and light up every moment. I remember the way you looked at me when you were proud, or when you wanted to make sure that I saw you. I did, my child. I saw you then, and I still see you now. I see you in the small details of life and hear you in the peeling of the wind chime. I catch glimpses of you everywhere. There are days when I still want to call your name out loud, as if you will just walk through the door and answer me. Some nights I say prayers that you still know how much you are loved, and how m...

Right there in the ozarks of Arkansas, where the earth still holds the blood of lynched bodies and echoes of night riders, a new danger is taking root. Disguised as a quiet rural commune, a self-declared white nationalist town is being carved out with 160 acres of exclusion and hate. They call it “Return to the Land.” Return to the land my arse. Don’t let the pastoral branding fool you. It has nothing to do with community farming or sustainable living. This coded fortress is nothing more than a repackaged segregationist ideology with solar panels and Wi-Fi.   History as Rehearsal: This movement is not new either. It is the digital grandchild of the White Citizens’ Councils. The rhetoric has changed, but the goal has not. It is still remove, isolate, and dominate. The world has watched what happens when people build ethno-nationalist states. They don’t end in quiet. They end in genocide, apartheid, and collapsed democracies. (I say ‘collapsed democracies’ tongue in cheek). Als...

In Georgia this spring, Adriana Smith  30 years old and pregnant - was declared brain-dead. But for over four months, the state kept her body alive on machines to grow a fetus, without her family’s consent, without Adriana's voice, and without Adriana's dignity. Georgia's six-week abortion ban was cited as justification. And just like that, a dead woman’s body became a battleground in the war over fetal personhood. The legal machinery behind this tragedy  was meant to control life. And it did. This is what happens when law eclipses love, and when compassion is a casualty of political performance. The scaffolding that holds up such cruelty is older than this moment. It is rooted in power, patriarchy, and the insidious lie that some lives are disposable if others are deemed more "worthy." We’ve seen this before in the silencing of enslaved women, forced sterilizations, and in the criminalization of miscarriage.  I chair the Committee on the Status and Role of Women ...

I have something to say about the gall of Western media to still approach formerly colonized nations with the smugness of a master quizzing a servant. The now-viral interview with President Dr. Irfaan Ali of Guyana was definitely more than just a conversation about oil and development. It exposed the festering wound of neocolonial arrogance that still believes it has the right to interrogate the dignity and direction of sovereign nations while refusing to reckon with the centuries of theft, murder, and dehumanization that built its own empires. Yes, England, I am talking about you! Dr. Ali was understood the assignment to a spade a spade regardless to who is holding the hand. What we witnessed was the spirit of resistance cloaked in a presidential suit. With unflinching clarity and righteous indignation, he named the historical theft of resources, the violence of chattel slavery, the deceit of colonialism, and the continued exploitation masquerading as investment and partnership. And s...

They didn’t tell my people that they were free, right away. Even after the ink dried on the Emancipation Proclamation, they didn't tell them. Not even after the blood spilled and bodies piled in the name of a nation supposedly united under liberty and justice were they told. Instead, the power-brokers waited and held freedom hostage behind borders of greed, ego, and entitlement. And on June 19, 1865 - two and a half years later - when word finally reached the shores of Galveston, Texas, it wasn’t because the enslaved had been seen as human. It was because their labor was no longer useful, their bondage no longer profitable, and their bodies no longer essential to the overall goal. The story of Juneteenth is that of a freedom which was announced late, thus postponing justice, and forcing liberation to find its own breath after being suffocated for centuries. Here we are in 2025 watching an administration strip away aid to vulnerable nations, criminalize immigrants, roll back civil r...