2 “How long will you go on like this?
You sound like a blustering wind.
3 Does God twist justice?
Does the Almighty twist what is right?
4 Your children must have sinned against him,
so their punishment was well deserved.
5 But if you pray to God
and seek the favor of the Almighty,
6 and if you are pure and live with integrity,
he will surely rise up and restore your happy home.
7 And though you started with little,
you will end with much.
8 “Just ask the previous generation.
Pay attention to the experience of our ancestors.
9 For we were born but yesterday and know nothing.
Our days on earth are as fleeting as a shadow.
10 But those who came before us will teach you.
They will teach you the wisdom of old.
20 “But look, God will not reject a person of integrity,
nor will he lend a hand to the wicked.
21 He will once again fill your mouth with laughter
and your lips with shouts of joy.
22 Those who hate you will be clothed with shame,
and the home of the wicked will be destroyed.”
In the journey of life, there are moments that will come where life will be difficult. Things will not make sense. It could be a hardship season for you. When those seasons come, it is easy to resort back to a place of fear, second guessing our faith, and wondering if God is really alive.
This scripture Job 8:5-8 reveals the power of prayer while seeking God in those difficult life seasons. What does seeking God look like? How do you seek God in a time of trouble?
Do not be afraid to ask Him if you need help. A lot of times, there is a sense of guilt or fear wondering whether God can handle your situation. But the reality is seeking Him reveals He cares and acknowledges the effort you make
Praying and asking for wisdom until you get the assurance that God has heard you. He will provide what you need. Assurance may not automatically come to you in prayer. However, as you seek Him regarding the situation, His peace will manifest that assures you He hears and will attend to you
Be alert as you pray for the instructions that will accompany the prayers. God may impress on you to forgive an offense, or do something that may not seem relevant to what you are inquiring about in prayer, but obey even if it does not make sense to you in the moment.
You should never judge yourself in your expression of pleading with God in prayer. The posture of pleading should not be misconstrued with begging. If you have been begging God to answer your prayers, your viewpoint of Him may be one of trying to convince Him you are worthy of a breakthrough or an answer. Pleading with God is making an earnest appeal to Him from a posture of faith. Your faith in God’s power and sovereignty pushes you to appeal to Him for your breakthrough.
Pleading often pulls from an established testimony with God. You have seen His power and miraculous grace and you are confident in what He is able to do.
This scripture also reveals the power of knowing the history of God’s work in the world. Finding out what God has done from previous generations, allows us to see the continuous integrity of God’s ability to provide and take care of His own. During a time of need, you may pull on the God of your parents or grand-parents or someone who is dear to you, who has walked with the grace and power of God in such a way that it convinced you of His existence. When you know this beautiful history, it can be used to affirm your faith in the moments you need prayers answered.
I have learned that in this life, there will be trials and tribulations that you will go through. Prayer will make it possible for you to live life with hope. When you get to those seasons, may you be reminded that prayer works, a history with God is powerful, and your faith can give you the confidence to make an appeal for what you need from Him.
He is able to restore you to a prosperous state. That is something you should always desire.
Prayer
Dear Father,
I thank you today, for those who came before me, who consistently served you and established a history of faithfulness with you. I know I am an answered prayer for someone else. As I pray, help me to build a history with you, that others will be inspired by, that will make them believers in your Presence. I release any form of guilt that makes me feel afraid to appeal to you. By faith I believe, as I am seeking you earnestly, you will restore me to my prosperous state.
Recently, I began reading the book Christmas is not Your Birthday by Mike Slaughter, lead pastor of Ginghamsburg Church, as a part of an Advent small group series hosted by Impact Church in Atlanta, Georgia. The five-chapter book explores the idea of shifting the focus of Christmas from a me-me-me experience to one that gives-gives-gives to those who are in need. I could run the list of great points Pastor Slaughter presents about the commercialization of Christmas, but this blog is about something much more important.
The “cleaning up of Christmas,” or as Mike Slaughter puts it, “sanitizing” Christmas takes a look at our insatiable need to recreate the Christmas story into something it was not. This idea of sanitizing Christmas runs the gamut of images, new and old: there’s this peaceful, purified nativity scene, equipped with a modestly dressed Mary, an ever-loving Joseph, and a manger, though full of animals, cleaned, sterilized, and fit for a king. What the book suggests, however, is that there was nothing clean or neat about the birth of Christ.
Just think: Mary and Joseph had traveled for days to get to Bethlehem from Nazareth — no bathing, probably limited rest, and by the time they reached Bethlehem, Mary may have been in full-blown labor! (Have you ever seen a woman in labor? There’s nothing cute about that!)
We all know the story: there was no room in the inn for them to stay so they end up in a stable where animals lived. Animals, y’all. The hay that would eventually cushion Jesus’ manger (the trough from which livestock ate their food!) was the bed for sheep and goats, horses and donkeys. It was probably also their makeshift bathroom, too.
There was nothing clean or pretty about Jesus’ birth.
But we’ve spent centuries cleaning up this story to make it appear better than it really was. We’ve neatly tucked away the realities of the Christmas story, dressed it up, made it look and smell better because I mean honestly, who wants to worship a King born in the feces of barn animals? Who wants to admit that their savior found residence in the lowest of low places — a manger — surrounded by tired, weary parents who had spent days traveling to Bethlehem with nowhere to rest once they arrived?
So we clean it up! We dress Mary in her blue and white headdress, skin a-glow, hair perfectly coiffed. Joseph, in his humble attire, looks longingly at the baby resting in the feeding trough. We strategically place each lowly lamb and honorable horse at the feet of a pristine, babbling Messiah, pushing away the idea that someone who came to save the world in so much power and grandeur could be born in such a despicable and dishonorable way. And let us not forget the white-washing of the Christmas story; remember a few years ago when former FOX News commentator Megyn Kelly declared that Jesus was a white man, drudging up the age-old process of blotting out the color (read: melanin infused color) of the Jesus story. Not only have we had difficulty accepting Jesus as one who was born in the recesses of society, but we’ve also had a problem accepting Jesus, His parents, and the entire community from which he was born and lived as a people of color.
Mike Slaughter suggests that we read the Christmas story through a sanitized lens because we know what is going to happen in the end; This baby will grow up to become the Messiah, our Redeemer who spends the last three years of His life as a rabble-rouser. Because we often view Jesus from the other end of calvary, it becomes easy to retell His story in a way that is more aesthetically pleasing for us. It’s easy to make the ugliness of our stories appear beautiful when we are confident that the end will be favorable; but what happens to the story when you are not as sure?
From Mary and Joseph’s perspective, they were not sure how this birthing-the-Messiah thing would work out. The angel Gabriel brings this bazar message, and though both Mary and Joseph have some hesitation over it (depending on which of the Gospels you’re reading), they accept the Word of the Lord which results in them facing ridicule and shame for nine months. What a challenge of their faith! Remember: Mary and Joseph had not yet the privilege of knowing Jesus as risen savior as we do; their understanding of the birth of Jesus is not through the lens of Calvary. They were living in the moment! This experience, as I’ve suggested, was ugly, smelly, and quite oxymoronic considering the child being born would reign as king one day.
But, don’t we do this in our lives as well? Don’t we take the ugliest parts of ourselves and sanitize it, make it cleaner and more presentable to the public so that our story is better received? We shove down the shame, hide the hideous, remove the regretful to allow a more socially acceptable story to shine through — in hopes that those around us will accept us the way we’ve presented it. We dress up the lies, twist how the story really went so that those around us will feel better about their own stories of fear, shame, and doubt. We reframe the circumstances behind an unexpected pregnancy to appease these social pressures of single parenthood. We reshape the story to explain how a divorce shattered a seemingly picture-perfect family. We reconstruct the tale we tell about a sudden foreclosure on a sprawling mansion after keeping up with the Jones’ became just too much.
We are meticulous in repainting the picture to make it look presentable to the world. How useful could someone who has been rejected, broken, and born into a manger really be?
I think the Christmas story answers this lingering question — how useful can someone with a not-so-spectacular story be used to do great things? When we consider the realness of how Jesus was born, it allows for us to take a step back and consider the power of His birth. Jesus’ birth story was not one of pristine privilege or dressed up dramatics. It was of some young and in love folks agreeing to say “yes” to something beyond their understanding. It was a total commitment to follow through on their beliefs despite facing ridicule and having to birth their promise on top of hay full of animal crap. And despite all of those not-so-pleasurable things, Jesus’ story lives on in the annals of history. And ours will too.
What stories have you sanitized to make others (or even yourself) feel better about? This Christmas, consider removing the rose-tinted glasses from your story — share it! I’m challenging myself to be and remain transparent, to tell my story as-is, no cleaning it up. The Christmas story is much more than gift-giving and receiving — it is an opportunity for us to dig deeper into the realities of our story and use them to share the miracles in our own lives!
Sunday marks the beginning of Advent, the liturgical season observed by many Christians as a period of waiting and preparation for the Nativity of Jesus. This season begins four Sundays before Christmas and concludes on Christmas. The hanging of greens, adorning sanctuaries and wearing vestments of purple, and lighting the Advent wreath candles in order to move from darkness to light are key components in Advent observation. All of this is in anticipation of the celebration of the birth of Jesus, a birth that people anxiously awaited then and a symbolic birth we should anxiously await now. But some may ask, “Why must we wait for something that has already happened? Why exist in symbolic darkness for a time in order to celebrate that which was revealed some 2000 years ago? Why is this relevant to our time?” I suggest that we must wait in order to reclaim the wonder of the light that was brought into this world.
Earlier this year, during an Ash Wednesday service at a large Baptist church, I looked forward to ushering in the season of penitence with somber worship and a penitent message. Ash Wednesday is supposed to remind us of our finitude and it plunges us into a season of penitence, and the journey into the wilderness with Christ. But as I sat in that Ash Wednesday service, I was jolted from somber reflection with songs of joy and a sermon celebrating victory. Not a moment in the service–besides the impartation of ashes which concluded the service–was spent ushering people into the dry season ahead of them because the church couldn’t not praise. On one hand I understood the church’s inability to squelch their praise. It’s a church that has seen many trials and tribulation and its membership are a part of the resilient race in this country who can’t not praise because of how far they’ve come by faith. Why would they want to launch themselves into a period solemnity? But on the other hand, I desired for this congregation to withhold their praise and shouts of victory in order to rightfully claim it at the end of the Lenten season. In doing this, they would truly walk with their redeemer and taste the sweetness of victory because they had made the journey by way of symbolically situating themselves on Ash Wednesday as sojourners with Jesus. This too is our call during the season of Advent except that we are not sojourners with Jesus this time around but sojourners with a generation of people who were awaiting his arrival. People who heard a particular prophecy about the coming of Jesus and who were waiting and preparing for his arrival. People who didn’t have Christmas gift shopping, parties to attend, and a plethora of “holiday” distractions, but who were watching and waiting for him. I imagine that their wait was one of wonder mixed with skepticism fueled by the rumors of Mary, a virgin, who was impregnated by the Holy Spirit with the son of God. How unbelievable that had to be then and how unbelievable we should consider it now in order to rekindle the wonder of it all. Awesome wonder is what this season is about.
Yesterday in church I was reminded of how in danger we are of losing that wonder because we are so familiar with the stories that tell of the coming of Jesus. Some of us know it like the back of our hands and it has become so commonplace that the narrative of a young virgin impregnated by the Holy Spirit and giving birth to the son of God seems just as plausible as a man getting pregnant and giving birth. Some of us are no longer moved by the story because we’ve spent years with it in our churches, in our seminaries and Bible colleges, and in our homes, but we force ourselves to be moved just a few days before Christmas because that’s what we’ve been trained most to do. Many wind down and reflect as they start to wrap up their Christmas shopping, place the last few gifts under the tree, and bake the last batch of cookies. A reflection on the true significance of this moment on the Christian liturgical calendar is sometimes left as an afterthought to what is given top billing on the calendar of capitalism. But we must wait, and wait longer than a few days, to acclimate ourselves to the coming of Jesus. When we take hold of the season of waiting that Advent is, we give ourselves the opportunity to experience the wonder of every occasion that lead up to the birth of Jesus.
When we read the Gospel narratives that foretell of Jesus’ birth, of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, of the Magnificat, we must stop ourselves from breezing through it quickly because we’ve heard it all before. Instead we should be held captive by every word as if we were hearing it for the first time and as if we may never hear it again. When we repeat the refrain, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appear,” we are implicating ourselves as those in captivity in need of a release from our self-imposed exile. Given the capitalism and consumerism that has marked this season—and the violence it has wrought—we are now, more than ever, in the need of the discipline of waiting. We must wait in order to restore the wonder of this blessed season we are in, a season that shines light into dark places and gives many hope. We must wait, not only for ourselves but for every person who has yet to experience the great hope that many of us know so well. We must wait so that we refresh ourselves in the wondrous love to come over receiving it as an entitlement that we might take for granted. We must wait, because in waiting we are forced to slow down, and in slowing down we gain perspective on the significance of this season which brings us back to wonder. The awesome wonder of the coming of Jesus is what this season is about, just wait for it.
UrbanFaith Editor Allen Reynolds interviewed Jon M. Chu, director of the blockbuster movie Wicked featuring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. The full interview is above. The move is in theaters everywhere. The trailer is below.
Man, one of my favorite authors, I mean, I just want to be blunt with you. Every time I see you on Meet the Press, Eddie, I’m always like, he is dead on about something. I don’t know where it comes from. So where were you when you said to yourself, “Self, I need to write a book [like] We Are The Leaders that We’ve been Looking For?”
Dr. Glaude
You know, this book is based on a set of lectures I delivered like in 2011. And I was so angry at that moment. Everybody was excited about the Obama presidency. And I was angry in some ways, doc, that people were reading Obama’s presidency as the fulfillment of the black freedom struggle. That that’s what the object of all that sacrifice was for, was to get a black man in the White House. And I just thought, that’s not true. What happened to love, what happened to justice, what happened to the moral dimension of the movement? I wanted to think through that. I wanted to figure out what were we relinquishing, what were we giving up in that moment. And then fast forward, all these years later, I returned to those lectures. And I returned to them because in some ways I had lost my footing. I was trying to figure things out because COVID had disrupted so much, I had lost two partners. I felt like I was unmoored, untethered as it were. And I knew these lectures were a moment when I was trying to usher in a new way of being for myself, a new way of thinking for myself, a new way of writing for myself. So I wanted to go back to that moment. And lo and behold, I saw what I was trying to do differently. So all of this happened in the summer of 2023. And I got to work. And then I submitted the manuscript to the editor at Harvard University Press and they were like, OMG, let’s get this out as soon as we can.
Maina
What would you say to people who feel the disillusionment of people who are going, “I don’t want to be the leader?”
Dr. Glaude
I think part of what I’m trying to argue is that when we outsource our responsibility for the house [of this country], when we say, well, I don’t want to pay the mortgage then we know what’s going to happen. And so we cannot outsource our responsibility for democracy any longer to so called prophets, to so called heroes, to politicians. We have to understand this is where Ella Baker, Miss Baker, is so important that we are our salvation in this instanc. Of course, that that doesn’t disregard one’s faith claims, but it’s what we do.And there’s a somewhat cliche at the heart of the book. And that is that if we are the leaders we’ve been looking for, then we got to become better people. We got to reach for higher forms of excellence. James Baldwin used to put it this way, the messiness of the world is often a reflection of the messiness of our interior lives. So if we don’t begin to do that hard work on becoming better people, then we can’t be the source of significant change. But I also should say this, doing the hard work of becoming a better human being must take place alongside of [and] within our ongoing effort to make a more just world. Because the world as it currently is organized gets in the way of us becoming better people. It’s almost like you’re rewarded to be selfish, you’re rewarded to be greedy, you’re rewarded to be mean spirited, you’re rewarded to be self-regarded. You’re not rewarded if you’re other regarded, if you’re not regarded if you have an I, thou relationship [with others as non-objects], you’re not regarded if you’re committed to justice, if you’re committed to the least of these, you see what I mean? If you’re maladjusted to an unjust world, you’re not rewarded. So we got to do the hard work of self-cultivation in pursuit of a more just world. That’s the heart of the book.
Maina
Which one of these people did you fall in love with the most? You’re taking some of the very, very best and you’re dropping them right in front of us and there are nuggets right in front of us. Which one did you go, “I am more in line with this leader.”
Dr. Glaude
It depends on what age you ask me. So when I was a young kid growing up in Mississippi, Dr. King meant everything. I remember checking out the album, show you how old I am. It was the vinyl of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It was the March on Washington. And I remember stopping it and learning it by memory from Mrs. Mitchell’s eighth grade history class. And Dr. King was so important to how I imagined myself. When I got to Morehouse, you’re baptized in King’s thought. You got the statue of him looking at you. And so King was so important for me at a young age. But then when I got to Morehouse, Malcolm became my guy. And I have my goatee to this day. I will never cut it off as kind of testimony from my first conversion experience, reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. So here I am excited to be at King’s Alma Mater and my freshman year, this guy walks up to me and said, “You’re like a hand without a thumb. You don’t know who you are.” And he gave me Malcolm X’s autobiography. And I read it that night. And I found the language for my father’s anger. I found the language for how to imagine myself as a man, given the fact that I was so afraid because my father scared me to death. Malcolm became this hero of mine that I cut my political teeth on. And now here I am in my fifties. And Miss Baker is all up in me. It’s a more mature voice, I suppose, but we wouldn’t have a black freedom struggle of the 20th century if it wasn’t for her. And the way in which she has that wonderful line, “A strong people doesn’t need a strong leader.” And I said this once, I was speaking, I think it was in Chicago. I was like, “What happens when you have fans in the pews and a celebrity in the pulpit?” The church is dead. It’s done. I think we’re seeing a lot of that right now. What happens when you outsource your faith journey to someone else? And so part of what I’ve been trying to do is to live Miss Baker’s edict. Because the title of the book comes from her. We are the leaders we have been looking for. She says, “We have to convince people that their salvation is in their hands.” What we choose to do. Not what the preacher chooses to do, not what the politician chooses to do. So not what Malcolm inspired me to do, not what King leads me to do, but what’s coming from inside of my heart in light of the exemplars of excellence and love that inform and shape my own voice as I understand it. And that’s what I’m writing towards in the book.
Maina
You keep talking to me. So last question. Sure. Your spiritual faith journey, did that come into play in this book at all?
Dr. Glaude
It’s at work in all of my texts. To be honest with you, it’s me trying to understand what does it what does it mean to be decent and loving? What does it mean to exemplify the ministry of Jesus without it being overlaid with dogma and an institutional constraint. So when I call for a coalition of the decent, animated by the power of love, that is the exacting power of love. That is that is at the heart of my religious Christian witness, as it were. And there’s a moment in the book near the end where I’m going to invoke Jimmy Baldwin again. He has this extraordinary essay that is published after his after his death is entitled “To Crush A Serpent.” And in this in this essay, he is relentless in his critique of the Fallwells and the moral majority and the like. But he talks about what salvation involves, what it entails. And it’s an echo of an earlier essay, a talk that he gave at Kalamazoo in 1961, entitled “In Search For A Majority.” And he says salvation is found in effect in “the going towards.” Salvation is found in the going towards in some ways. And I want to suggest that salvation is found in the going towards and love is its carriage. So the short answer to the question is, is yes, me trying to figure all of this out, indebted to the Christian tradition, but not limited by it. Those lectures produced an uncommon faith. So the short answer is yes, all my books are or attempts to make sense of this complex journey that I’m making in terms of my faith.
Maina
Dr. Glaude