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Excerpt
I
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am a sinner. I stand with one foot in each
world, one called sin, the other called grace. I stand in the midst of sins I
have committed today and yesterday and those I inevitably will commit on
tomorrow. And whatever my sins—and they are many—none of them are greater than
His grace that by the blood of His Son can make me—us—in the words of a Gospel
hymn, “whiter than snow.” I stand because of our Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ—He who remembers when others forget but also He who forgets when others
remember. I stand. And yet, without Him, I can do nothing.
I stand here, somewhere on the timeline of Christianity—more
than 2,000 years after the Day of Pentecost, 18 centuries after Roman Emperor
Constantine the Great placed his thumbprint on Christianity, and many years
after the Great Awakenings. I stand somewhere in the afterglow of the Azusa
Street Revival in Los Angeles, California, which gave birth to modern Pentecostalism
in America. I stand. Between the cries of ancestral slaves in the cotton fields
of southern plantations, between my great-great grandfather’s pastoral prayers
in Pulaski, Illinois, where he—Burton Roy—migrated from Atlanta, Georgia, after
the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation set him free from the bonds of
slavery he inherited from birth. I stand.
I stand on the prayers of my grandmother and grandfather,
Florence Geneva and George Albert Hagler, who, in 1943 made their way, like
millions of southern blacks during the Great Migration to Freedom Land up
north—in their case Chicago. I stand as testament to the prayers and faith of
the “prayer warriors,” those gray-haired church mothers with whom on Tuesday
and Friday mornings at one storefront church or another we petitioned God for
my soul, health and future. I stand as proof that God hears even the cries of a
ghetto boy.