02/15/2026
In Honor of Black History Month ~ One Christian's Perspective:
This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it! Rejoicing often involves singing. I remember hearing a rough sounding man singing a chant from the radio when I was a small girl. I say rough because he didn’t sound like anyone that had ever been in my home, neither did he sound anything like the Reverend at church. Actually, he sounded angry and I wondered why. “Say it loud, I’m Black & I’m proud! Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud!” I wondered why he was so angry about proclaiming his blackness. Was being Black something to be angry about?
While attending the predominantly Caucasian private Christian school a few years later, I finally understood what the man meant. I made friends at the school, but there were mean girls and bullying boys. They seemed to pick on the kids who weren’t white. By the second year at that school, I wrote in my journal, “Life would be so much easier if I were white.” I didn’t dislike being Black, I just wanted to be normal, and for that 9 year old girl, normal was white because you could blend in; not stand out. You could just, be. I didn’t want to be white, I wanted to be me and not be a target. They were deprived of the joy that was me because I wasn’t allowed to thrive there. My parents eventually moved me from that school, but the lesson in what it feels like to be “other” stays with me. The right to just be is still, too often, denied Black people in America and if we are systematically denied this human right, every other "other" in this country is also denied that human right.
Today, despite the 400 years of significantly contributing to the wealth and power of this nation, and despite the gains of the Civil Rights Era, it seems as being Black still makes one an other, easy to target and dehumanize. Even in the Church, we see those who are supposed to be our sisters and brothers, those who are supposed to love us, and stand in solidarity with us, abandon us, mistreat us, even tacitly agree with stripping us from our birthrights. Scripture says in I John 2:11, “But whoever hates another believer is in the darkness, walks in the darkness, and does not know the way to go, because the darkness has brought on blindness.” America seems to have lost its way and is fumbling blindly in the dark. But, hear the good news! Jesus is the Light of the world! Jesus came to give sight to the blind. A touch from the Master can restore America's sight and clear America’s vision.
This February as we commemorate Black History Month, let us look for the ways in which God moved through our “otherness” to create places of light in a lost and dying world. God said, “Let there be light!” And light was. Let us take the Light of God with us into a darkening America so that we can all see clearly.
Now, let us run on and see what the Lord will do in this place.
