Today’s Prayer to Passage will be from the book “Go Tell It on the Mountain” by James Baldwin.

Today I pray, “Dear God, This book title encompasses what I do here. Only I do what I do in a modern, Americanized way. It would be silly if I followed my callings with inauthenticity, as that would not be following a calling at all. It can be difficult to distinguish, at times, Your Voice from the crowd. And yet it is with ease and playfulness that I have grown into this discernment. Thank You for the Christ-consciousness of all of this. Healing, joy, and love. Amen.”

Following my prayer, I held the closed book in my hands and opened it to this passage:

“All that befell: in her joys, her pipe in the evening, her man at night, the children she suckled, and guided on their first short steps; and in her tribulations, death, and parting, and the lash, she did not forget that deliverance was promised and would surely come. She had only to endure and trust in God.”
—JAMES BALDWIN

I was thinking about my six-month-old nephew today. I received the opportunity to spend one day a week, caring for him between his ages three-months to six-months. During that time, I noticed that at age three-months, when I held his bottle of his mother’s breast milk for him, he did not hold it with me. Then, by the time he became six-months in the world, I was able to guide his hands to hold his own bottle of his mother’s milk. And he started to reach for toys, and hold them. He became aware, in a sense, without a language beyond showing me, of his own possibility to create.

And he took his first steps in that six-month marker — with my holding his hands above his head and guiding him, barefoot in the grass. Babies dream. And they are aware of their own senses of possibility. And so it goes. Humans dream. And we are aware of our own senses of possibility.