SubscribeAn after-Easter high and a presidential church visit
I am feeling blessed, doubly so today. My Lenten season fasting and prayers kept my spirits lifted, even during some trying times over the last 40 days. The services I attended on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, which offered a fresh look at God’s great love for me –for us–buoyed me even more. And yesterday a relative told me about an incident that bears witness once again to God grace and mercy in her life and mine.
A couple of weeks ago, my relative prepared for a spring break trip by having her car serviced – oil checked, fluids checked, tire pressure checked. She then headed south, driving the 579 miles to Savannah.
On her return trip on Palm Sunday, my daughter Olivia and I, who had taken the train to Savannah for my aunt’s 100thbirthday party, rode with her. We left Savannah around 6:30 a.m. and drove uneventfully through the day. The check engine light came on at one point but was not a cause for concern. I took over driving the last few hours and when the front end of the car started to vibrate, I asked my relative about it. The car started shaking on the trip down, she offered.
“I probably need an alignment,” she added, recalling how she had to maneuver in the aftermath of February’s snow storm. “It’ll stop when you reach 80 miles.”
After dropping us off in D.C., she made it safely back to her Baltimore home. It was only then that she happened to notice the front tire on the driver’s side. The side of tire facing inside the car was a mass of threads and wires. How we made it all those miles without that shredded tire going completely flat or worse is inconceivable. Except that, we were riding on the wings of prayer.
“I could have been dead,” she remarked Easter Sunday. As we talked, she repeated a few lyrics to Kirk Carr’s “God blocked it.”
“We could have been dead,” I added, mouthing my remix of Marvin Sapp’s “Never could have made it” and a chord from the Clark Sister’s “Blessed and Highly Favored.”
“It shoulda’ been me,
It woulda’ been me if it wasn’t for the blood,
if it wasn’t for the blood.”
So without a doubt, I believe in the hope wrapped up in Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. It is what keeps me going despite dangers seen and unseen.
————–
BTW….. I think it was great that the President Obama and his family worshiped on Easter Sunday at a church in Southeast Washington, an area with neighborhoods plagued by crime and high unemployment. The pastor of historic Allen Chapel AME Church, the Rev. Michael E. Bell Sr., said it was “a monumental moment for us as a community.”
Rev. Bell also described the President’s visit as ”bringing healing and hope into this community right now.” Last Tuesday, four young people were killed and five were injured in a senseless drive-by shooting in a Southeast neighborhood.
The president didn’t go to Allen Temple, which began ministering to free blacks just before the Civil War, to speak. He and his family went to worship, and from the story and video in The Washington Post it appears that what they did. It has been difficult for the First Family to find a church home here, the president has said, because his visits are intrusive to the regular churchgoers.
Continue to pray for our President and his family, our country and its leaders.
Related posts:
