If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. John 15:18 Greetings Family: This last week has been a week!  I experienced a rush of emotions, remembrances, apprehensions, and reminders of a perpetual anger that lives within people who look like me.  It occurred to me this is all too familiar.  Like five years ago familiar, or ten years ago familiar, or twenty years ago familiar, or fifty years ago familiar, as it relates to brown people existing in this country. This week I heard the cries of an ugly racism operating in plain sight once again, and I heard people eloquently dissecting white privilege, and I heard attempts at justifications like; “if you guys regularly kill one-another, then what’s the problem”?   Family, it occurred to me once again that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and even with cameras in clear view (like in the nation’s capital, and Minnesota, and Atlanta), team blue will perform because the show must go on?    So, I needed a word.  I found no million preacher marches, or denominational outrage, or clergy taking to the streets in mass to lead the congregation of a generation who dared to say enough.  I looked up to the skies and not one private jet.   Not one Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr to lead the way with a concise plan that will survive past the news cycles.  Like David, in this moment I am left to encourage myself and so I prayed. I pray like maybe my grandmother prayed, or her grandmother prayed.  I pray like maybe someone in a cotton field prayed, or someone in the bowels of a ship prayed.  I pray like maybe someone in the Jim Crow south prayed, or someone in a prison prayed.  I pray like I need Jesus right now. I am reminded through the accounts of John that there is a loving God who made it so that if I abide in Him, He would also in me.  I am reminded that even now, in this moment, my responsibility is to bear fruit.  I am reminded that I am made clean through the word that was spoken unto me.  I am reminded that standing for righteousness requires that, like Jesus, I too will be hated.  I am reminded that I can ask what I will, and it shall be done.  I am reminded that my Christianity requires faith and work. Family, supposed God sent a coronavirus to sit us down for a few months?  Now supposed in that time the church prepared for a revival.  Now supposed God’s time is not like our time and the revival is in the streets and on your TV screen.  Now supposed every branch that does not bear fruit God takes away. Stay tuned! God bless you Pastor Don