Living History

Sometimes God has to remind me how blessed I am.

It's easy to get distracted by the day-to-day craziness of life and become convinced that life is conspiring against you. Quite often, I find myself wallowing in my whining about how heavy my burden feels. Sure, I pay lip service to the concept that I'm blessed and that billions of people suffer much more than me daily, but in my heart of hearts I'm still whining.

I like when God opens my eyes.

Often it's so unexpected it reinforces my belief in miracles. This time I was attending a function that I expected to be boring, and my expectations were being met fully. In the midst of wondering what I was going to have for lunch, I got some inspiration.

It happened as I listened to folks talk about black history as a living, breathing organism, and I started to feel something. As these folks discussed their childhoods and the old ethos of their communities, I began to feel a connection to those ancestors who had trod dusty roads before me. It was only a stirring, but I stopped worrying about lunch and started listening to people talk about life.

My good feeling could have ended there, with me slightly inspired and still mired in my mundane concerns, but God didn't want that. He wanted to remind exactly how far we as a people have truly come.

To do that, he introduced me to an old woman, who was history. When I say that, what I mean is that she seemed like a typical old black lady, but when I talked to her about her life, I got a glimpse of how heroes come to life and how worlds are changed. There was nothing exceptional about this woman's appearance. She had rheumy eyes, and a hearing aid. She moved her mouth in that peculiar way that old people have, and she had the shuffling gait that all of us will likely develop if we live long enough.

But, when she spoke, she spoke in clear tones. She punctuated her sentences with little pokes of her finger into my chest and arms. This old lady had something to say, and she wanted to make sure I knew it.

She talked to me of eating in the back of gas stations and sharing old nasty faucets with her kids because she wasn't allowed inside. She spoke of desegrating churches because she wasn't going to allow anyone to force her to serve a Jim Crow God. This woman had organized her community and she was confident in her ability to make things happen.

She was secure in the history she had created.

There are so many people like this in our world. Black, white, Asian and Latino, they live among us, appearing to be just average citizens. But, when we listen to their stories, some of them have jewels of experience that can make our lives so much richer. They can give us an honest recollection of the things we only learn about through books.

I regret not taking better advantage of my opportunities to learn about history through the elders in my family before they passed on into death or senility. Unfortunately, when you're young you often have little time to reflect because you're so convinceed that what you're doing today is important. It's only later, when age and experience give you some context, that you understand how much you owe to the generations that came before you, and how much you can learn from them.

I wrote this post because that experience made a difference to me and it was a fitting way for me to end Black History Month.

With living history.




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