The Journey: Forty Days of Promise
Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity

Day Thirteen: It’s Wonderful to Be Forgiven

Welcome to day thirteen of our forty-day intercultural journey. From Martin Luther King Day to the end of Black History Month we are focusing on The Journey: Forty Days of Promise—Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity.

Day Thirteen: It’s Wonderful to Be Forgiven[1]

*Continued from Day Twelve . . .

Positioned in front of the firing squad, Chaplain White asks Private Mapps one last time, “Do you feel that Jesus will be with you?”

“Yes,” he replies.

“Do you put all your trust in him?”

“I do,” is his answer.

“Do you believe that you will be saved?”

“I do; for though they may destroy my body, they cannot hurt my soul.”

White then prays this benediction. “Eternal God, the Master of all the living and Judge of all the dead, we commit this our dying comrade into thy hands from whence he came. Now, O my Lord and my God, for thy Son’s sake, receive his soul unto thyself in glory. Forgive, him—forgive, O thou Blessed Jesus, for thou didst die for all mankind, and bid them to come unto thee, and partake of everlasting life. Save him, Lord—save him, for none can save but thee, and thee alone. Amen. Good-by, my brother, good-by.”

The order is now given: “Ready! Aim! Fire!” All earthly life extinguished. Eternal life commences.

White brilliantly, lovingly, and scripturally enlightened Mapps to see that it’s horrible to sin, but wonderful to be forgiven. Skillfully he wove together ancient Scripture and pressing need.

Turning of Heart

Private Mapps’ response to Chaplain White’s death-bed ministry offers one example of how God reconciled an African American to Himself. Through interviews, slave narratives, autobiographies, and letters, we are fortunate to have a multitude of first-hand accounts of personal conversion experiences.

These vivid descriptions help us to understand the literal turning of heart (metanoia—repentance, change of mind), transformation of identity, and reorientation of personhood that occurred at the salvation of African Americans. We have much to learn from them about how to witness to any oppressed, marginalized people, how to explain the need for a Savior, how to encourage repentance, how to offer the grace of forgiveness, and how to explain the changes that occur in one’s nurture and nature at salvation.

Learning Together From Our Great Cloud of Witnesses

1. Like Chaplain White, how can you weave together ancient Scripture and pressing modern needs?

2. What change of mind and heart took place in your life at your point of salvation?

[1]Excerpted, modified from, and quoted from Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. Purchase your copy at 40% off for only $10.00 at www.rpmministries.org.

The Journey: Forty Days of Promise
Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity

Day Ten: Longing for Someone to Confide In

Welcome to day ten of our forty-day intercultural journey. From Martin Luther King Day to the end of Black History Month we are focusing on The Journey: Forty Days of Promise—Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity.

Day Ten: Longing for Someone to Confide In[1]

The most horrific aspect of slave family life was the rape of black women by their masters and others. Harriet Jacobs, the victim of constant lewd advances from her master, expresses her despondency because of the birth of a daughter.

“When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women” who inevitably must endure licentious assaults on their virtue.

Jacobs describes the onset of such onslaught in her own life.

“But I now entered on my fifteenth year—a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import.” She felt that “every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows.”

Her master, Dr. Flint, tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles that her grandmother had instilled in her. He peopled her young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could imagine. She turned from him with disgust and hatred, but he was her master. She was compelled to live under the same roof with him—where she saw a man forty years her senior daily violating the most sacred commandment. He told her that she was his property and that she must be subject to his will in all things.

“My soul revolted against the mean tyranny. But where could I turn for protection.”

Jacobs longed for someone to confide in and “would have given the world to have laid my head on my grandmother’s faithful bosom, and told her all my troubles.” However, Dr. Flint swore that he would kill her if she was not as silent as the grave. Being very young, Jacobs felt “shamefaced about telling her (grandmother) such impure things, especially as I knew her to be very strict on such subjects.”

A Skillful Spiritual Friend

What was she to do? And what are we to do when life kills the dreams we dream; what recourse do we have? We, like Jacobs, can turn to those who love us unconditionally.

“Still I was not stripped of all. I still had my good grandmother, and my affectionate brother.” Of him, she writes, “When he put his arms round my neck, and looked into my eyes, as if to read there the troubles I dared not tell, I felt that I still had something to love.”

Her affectionate brother was a skillful spiritual friend. Consider his relational competencies: the appropriate use of physical touch, the meaningful application of eye contact, accurately reading body language, sensing unspoken pain, and communicating unconditional love. And consider the result of his ministry: the rebirth of love.

A Skillful Spiritual Director

Her saintly grandmother was a skillful spiritual director. Upon finally learning of Dr. Flint’s advances, Jacobs’ grandmother confronts him, telling him plainly what she thought of his character. She then forcefully rebukes him:

“I tell you what, Dr. Flint, you ain’t got many more years to live, and you’d better be saying your prayers. It will take ’em all, and more too, to wash the dirt off your soul.”

When he responds by asking if she knows to whom she is speaking, she boldly replies, “Yes, I know very well who I am talking to.” Flint then backs down, leaving the house in a great rage.

The moment Flint leaves, Jacobs’ eyes meet those of her grandmother. The anger is gone, replaced with tenderness. Jacobs expresses amazement that her infidelity did not lessen her grandmother’s love for her. “She was always kind, always ready to sympathize with my troubles.”

Whereas Jacobs’ brother illustrates expert sustaining, her grandmother exhibits adroit reconciling. She literally takes her life in her hands to stand toe to toe with a white master. Even when she rebukes him, she retains concern for him—for his eternal destiny. She also demonstrates the vital ability to quickly shift from righteous anger to tender compassion, not to mention her expressions of unconditional love.

Learning Together From Our Great Cloud of Witnesses

1. What spiritual friendship principles can you learn from Harriet Jacobs’ brother?

2. What spiritual direction principles can you learn from Harriet Jacobs’ grandmother?

[1]Excerpted, modified from, and quoted from Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. Purchase your copy at 40% off for only $10.00 at http://www.rpmministries.org/.

The Journey: Forty Days of Promise
Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity

Day Nine: Leaving a Lasting Legacy

*Note: If you are enjoying the journey, then invite others, and purchase copies of Beyond the Suffering. Take your church small group or your youth or adult Sunday School class on the full version of the journey with the built-in discussion guide in Beyond the Suffering. Order at: www.rpmministries.org for 40% off.

Welcome to day nine of our forty-day intercultural journey. From Martin Luther King Day to the end of Black History Month we are focusing on The Journey: Forty Days of Promise—Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity.

Day Nine: Leaving a Lasting Legacy[1]

History has depicted the African American male and the African American father as beaten down by enslavement and racism, and therefore incapable of functioning as a positive role-model in society and the home. The slave narratives and interviews tell a very different story.

One ex-enslaved person recalls his enslaved father’s character.

“I loved my father. He was such a good man. He was a good carpenter and could do anything. My mother just rejoiced in him. . . . I sometimes think I learned more in my early childhood about how to live than I have learned since.”

All he ever needed to learn, he learned in his enslaved home.

Will Adam’s father, a foreman on a Texas plantation, always came home exhausted after a long day’s work. However, he never failed to take his son out of bed and play with him for hours.

Martin Jackson, enslaved in Texas, and interviewed there at age ninety in the 1930s, remembers his father always counseling him. Over half-a-century later, Jackson notes that his father’s reconciling advice and guiding prescriptions still ring in his ear. Among samples he includes:

“No use running from bad to worse, hunting better.” “Every man has to serve God under his own vine and fig tree.” “A clear conscience opens bowels, and when you have a guilty soul it ties you up and death will not for long desert you.”

Clearly, these sons honored and respected their godly, wise enslaved fathers.

Mother Wit

Mothers, too, left a lasting, positive impression on their children. Josiah Henson writes of the mother from whom he was separated by sale only to be reunited by repurchase after he had fallen ill.

“She was a good mother to us, a woman of deep piety, anxious above all things to touch our hearts with a sense of religion. . . . Now I was once more with my best friend on earth, and under her care.”

Premarital Counsel

Lucy Dunn was ninety years old when Mary Hicks interviewed her in Raleigh, North Carolina. She shares the standards and premarital counsel that her mother provided when Lucy fell in love with Jim Dunn.

Because purity was so central to her family, Lucy’s mother would not allow Jim to walk Lucy to the gate unless she was sitting there on the porch watching. After a year, without ever having kissed, Jim finally proposed—asking her mother for Lucy’s hand in marriage. Mother told him that she would have to talk to Lucy and let him know.

“Well all that week she talks to me, telling me how serious getting married is and that it last a powerful long time. I told her that I know it but that I am ready to try it and that I intend to make a go of it, anyhow.”

The next Sunday night, her mother informed Jim that he had her permission to marry her daughter. He was so excited that he picked Lucy right up out of her chair there in the moonlight on the porch and kissed her right before her mother who was crying with joy. The next Sunday they were married in the Baptist church at Neuse. Lucy had a new white dress, though times were hard.

Lucy offers a beautiful testimony concerning their marital relationship.

“We lived together fifty-five years and we always loved each other. . . . And though we had our fusses and our troubles we trusted in the Lord and we got through. I loved him during life and I love him now, though he’s been dead for twelve years.”

Her mother’s protection of Lucy’s purity, her pre-marital counsel, and her interaction with Lucy’s future son-in-law all strikingly display how enslaved African American families were victors, not victims. Lucy and Jim’s marriage, for richer for poorer, for better for worse, in good times and bad, provides a shining example of marital fidelity.

Learning Together From Our Great Cloud of Witnesses

1. What family life lessons can we learn from the African American mothers and fathers we have described?

2. What relationship commitment lessons can we learn Lucy’s mother, Lucy, and Jim?

[1]Excerpted, modified from, and quoted from Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. Purchase your copy at 40% off for only $10.00 at www.rpmministries.org.

The Journey: Forty Days of Promise
Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity

Day Eight: Pulling the Rope in Unison

Welcome to day eight of our forty-day intercultural journey. From Martin Luther King Day to the end of Black History Month we are focusing on The Journey: Forty Days of Promise—Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity.

Day Eight: Pulling the Rope in Unison[1]

It has become something of a cliché to imagine that black families today find it difficult to experience stability because of a long history of instability caused by slavery and racism. While not at all minimizing the obstacles that enslaved African American families have faced, history paints a truer and more optimistic picture of their response. Though everything fought against them, enslaved African Americans battled gallantly to maintain family cohesion—a cohesion that provided a sturdy platform from which to handle life courageously.

Jennie Hill was born and enslaved in 1837 in Missouri. Florence Patton interviewed the ninety-six-year-old Hill in 1933. During her interview, Hill adamantly resisted the notion that enslaved families lacked closeness.

“Some people think that the slaves had no feeling—that they bore their children as animals bear their young and that there was no heartbreak when the children were torn from their parents or the mother taken from her brood to toil for a master in another state. But that isn’t so. The slaves loved their families even as the Negroes love their own today. . .”

Hardships Do Not Make It Too Hard to Love

Communicating the message of African American family love was so important to Reverend Jones that he bore witness to it on the very first page of his narrative. “I can testify, from my own painful experience, to the deep and fond affection which the slave cherishes in his heart for his home and its dear ones. We have no other tie to link us to the human family, but our fervent love for those who are with us and of us in relations of sympathy and devotedness, in wrongs and wretchedness.”

Satan longs to blind African Americans to their legacy of family love. He wants all of us to believe that hardships make it too hard to love. Hill’s family, Jones’ family, and millions like them, belie that lie.

Truth for Life

Enslaved African American couples sustained strong marital relationships. Venture Smith was born in Dukandarra, in Guinea, about 1729. Kidnapped at age eight, Robertson Mumford purchased him a year later. After living with Mumford for thirteen years, Venture married Meg at age twenty-two. They remained together for over forty-seven years, through many trials and tribulations, until parted by death.

Venture’s narrative contains an explanation for their marital faithfulness. On the occasion of their marriage, Venture threw a rope over his cabin and asked his wife to go to the opposite side and pull on the rope hanging there while he remained and pulled on his end. After they both had tugged at it awhile in vain, he called her to his side of the cabin and by their united effort they drew the rope to themselves with ease. He then explained the object lesson to his young bride.

“If we pull in life against each other we shall fail, but if we pull together we shall succeed.”

Premarital couples, newlyweds, and seasoned married spouses would all do well to heed Venture’s guiding wisdom.

Learning Together from Our Great Cloud of Witnesses

1. Whether married or single, how can you apply African American family cohesion to your family and personal relationships?

2. What hardships are you facing that seem to make it too hard to love? How can the witness of the African American slaves empower you to defeat that lie?

[1]Excerpted, modified from, and quoted from Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. Purchase your copy at 40% off for only $10.00 at www.rpmministries.org.

The Journey: Forty Days of Promise
Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity

Day Seven: Groaning to the Father of the Fatherless

Welcome to day seven of our forty-day intercultural journey. From Martin Luther King Day to the end of Black History Month we are focusing on The Journey: Forty Days of Promise—Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity.

Day Seven: Groaning to the Father of the Fatherless: Perpetual Lament[1]

In the gripping slave narratives, we find believers sharing their hurting hearts with their caring Savior. In their practice of the biblical art of lament, African American Christians clung to biblical imagery.

For example, Pastor Peter Randolph describes a mother named Jenny who grieves the loss of her children.

“So she (Jenny) commends them to the care of the God of the widow and the fatherless, by bathing her bosom in tears, and giving them the last affectionate embrace, with the advice to meet in heaven. Oh, the tears of the poor slave that are in bottles, to be poured out upon his blood-stained nation, as soon as the cup of wrath of the almighty Avenger is full, when he shall say, ‘I have heard the groanings of my people, and I will deliver them from the oppressor!’”

Painting Pictures of God onto the Palettes of Life Portraits

Enslaved African Americans survived by painting pictures of God onto the palettes of their life portraits. They viewed Him as the Father of the fatherless, as the God who collects their tears in his bottle of remembrance, and as God the just Judge avenging their suffering, hearing their cries, and delivering their souls.

While Solomon Northup lies in a slave pen with fifty fellow slaves, he prays a prayer of personal lament.

“My cup of sorrow was full to overflowing. Then I lifted my hands to God, and in the still watches of the night, surrounded by the sleeping forms of my companions, begged for mercy on the poor, forsaken captive. To the Almighty Father of us all—the freeman and the slave—I poured forth the supplications of a broken spirit, imploring strength from on high to bear up against the burden of my troubles, until the morning light aroused the slumberers, ushering in another day of bondage.”

His mouth vocalizing his pain and his eyes watching God, Northup draws a line in the sand of retreat. When everything inside screams, “Surrender hope!” he cries out to God lamenting the evils he is suffering while pleading for strength to endure. He teaches us that the will to survive is soaked in continual lament.

Fixing Your Eyes on the Hope of the Future: Heavenly Reunion

Randolph explains that given such earthly sorrow, enslaved African Americans ministered to one another by emphasizing heavenly reunion. “In parting with their friends at the auction-block, the poor blacks have the anticipation of meeting them again in the heavenly Canaan, and sing:

‘O, fare you well, O, fare you well! God bless you until we meet again; Hope to meet you in heaven, to part no more. Sisters, fare you well; sisters, fare you well; God Almighty bless you, until we meet again.’”

Enslaved Virginian, William Grimes, summarizes it best. “If it were not for our hopes, our hearts would break.” Knowing that they would never see one another again in this world, they set their sights on another world.

Learning Together from Our Great Cloud of Witnesses

1. The will to survive is soaked in continual lament. What does that mean to you? How could you practice its meaning in your life?

2. How could you apply the truth of biblical lament in your ministry to others who are grieving?

3. In what situations do you say, ‘If it were not for my hopes, my heart would break? How does God sustain you through future hope?

4. What image of God do you cling to when life attempts to batter and break you?

[1]Excerpted, modified from, and quoted from Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. Purchase your copy at 40% off for only $10.00 at www.rpmministries.org.