“Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.”
I was a college senior – cynical and aloof. I recall reading Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in the cafeteria with the noise of forks and plates surrounding me. Yet King’s words found a place in my heart I didn’t know was there. I wept at the story of injustice. I wept at the courage of conviction of those who fought non-violently for equality. And I knew (somehow) that this was the essence of Jesus’s mission. He allowed himself to suffer, and it began to help me to find meaning in the presence of evil. King said you had to have “faith” that unjust suffering was redemptive. Could the civil rights movement have existed without the example of Christ, who set the standard for “unearned suffering?” My moment in the cafeteria, reading his speech, letting it soak into my emotions, broke through cynicism and helped me see that God was real. Real people, under the burden of great injustice, had faith. That HAD to mean something.
February 11, 2009 at 9:29 pm |
Thanks for sharing your experience, Daniel. I loved read this, and watching the video of Dr. King. I found it easy to identify with, as I have had many similar experiences, times God seems to take a spontaneous thought, a scene or picture, a sound or memory and touch my heart in a profound way. So awesome and wonderful that God can speak to us in so many ways, in such ordinary placs, at such inauspicious times.