Fear wears many masks. I used to think it was a one-dimensional kind of thing. A nail-biting, knee-knocking kind of reaction to anything that made me nervous or afraid. But fear that doesn’t warn us away from harm is not of God. It’s darkness. A tool of our enemy. And a smart enemy doesn’t announce his attack before he strikes. He sneaks in, making himself look harmless. Attractive…sometimes even like another person altogether. One of my favorite verses is Isaiah 41:10. “Fear not, for I Read More
freedom
How Thanksgiving Came to the United States and Why
When elementary school teachers across our nation tell their students the origins of Thanksgiving, there are accounts of pilgrims and Indians, complete with black-buckled hats and feathered headdresses, talk of starving people and the wisdom of men like Squanto who taught the Mayflower pilgrims how to survive amid a challenging new world. And while none of these accounts are wrong, the breaking of bread between the new Europeans and the Wampanoag tribesmen were not the beginning of Thanksgiving as we celebrate it today. In 1789, Read More
How to Break Free from the Chains
“I freed a thousand slaves. I would’ve freed a thousand more, if they only knew they were slaves.” ~Harriet Tubman If they only knew they were slaves… In writing and researching the Civil War, I learned Confederate plantation owners often made it their goal to break the will of their enslaved. They would make it their goal to have the slave accept their “station” as a mindset. After all, ‘normal’ is whatever you grow up with. ‘Normal’ is what you’ve always known. Frederick Douglass put Read More