I'm back after a powerful week in Valence with Don and Ruth Cripe of Healing for the Nations.
Helping out in this retreat reinforced for me how important this kind of teaching is to living, sharing and even understanding the Gospel.
We saw God do some wonderful things with five people who had come desperately seeking answers in their lives. Please pray for them as you read this. Four women and a man.
I also was thrilled to see that Matt Glock, an I.T. friend and colleague working in Grenoble, France, has gotten something out of reading Parting the Waters, by Taylor Branch. Matt's the first person I know who has taken me up on my challenge and encouragement to read this book.
He has started commenting on it on his blog. Check it out.
I still think this book should be required reading for EVERY American. And especially Christians. Even those who lived through the Civil Rights period who think they understood it.
The book -- based largely on wiretaps and other unimpeachable sources -- challenges us to reconsider what we think about the good old days of America when everything was moral and good. It makes us taste the incredible sacrifice that had to be made by so many people in order to start the course of the changes we tend to think magically occured in our society.
Was King an evil communist, a liberal, a great leader, a womanizer?
The book takes us beyond simplistic labels and into the complexities and realities of the real people that just may have saved America from becoming what Palestine and Israel are today.
We can't imagine such a thing. But what if those blacks who favored violence for ending the incredibly injust racial system that reigned in America had won out? What would white moderates have done if their children had been killed?
What if the ensuing repression pushed moderate blacks past the point of fatalistic acceptance?
Could we have had our own intefadah in the States?
I've heard too many Christians write off King and others as liberals who stirred up a bunch of trouble. I've also heard people look back on the period with nostalgia without seeing the many flaws of the people and tactics of this period of American history 1950s and 1960s.
I'm telling you, folks need to read this book.
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