Middle-Pause Pump-Priming Prompt
How Do You Light Up the World?
A question for long, cold nights and tough times
Note: Using the word ‘dark’ to describe rough times can be racist, offensive, and problematic. I want to own this and do my best here to find appropriate substitutions. My article riffs off of a talk that did use that word so I’ll use quotation marks for that. For more information about this, see this post from Teaching Traveling.
“I don’t feel this light you’re talking about.”
So said a dear friend sitting with me after church.
We’d just heard a wonderful and yet tough talk about the many paradoxes of light and shadow so apropos for this time of year when the days shorten and the nights lengthen.
Our church speaker, Brother Luchan, known to his homies as Kweku Agyeman, will be the first one to tell you how flawed he is in every way possible. Yet he was raised in a family of ministers and practitioners, cutting his teeth on messages of oneness, innate goodness, and abundant blessings.
Being a young urban African-American male, he pushed back with all he had. This goody-goody stuff didn’t speak to his experiences in the ‘hood.
