My Nightly Prayer

This may seem strange, but I really do pray this prayer almost every night. 

To understand this, you need to know that to "keep" your soul means to stay alive. For God to "take" your soul means for you to die and go live with Him. Here is the prayer:

"Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to keep."
Though, Lord, as you know,  I'm not asking to stay here forever, or even for any extended period of time. What I am suggesting is that, if you really do have good works planned for me to do, like you did for Paul and like Paul wrote about to the Ephesians in Chapter Two, I am okay to hang here for awhile and work on some of them. I just ask that you would give me a pretty clear picture of what they are. But if you don't, I will keep looking for them.

But I want you to know that anytime you get ready for me to come home, I am good to go. The only request I have about that is that, if I go first, you would take really, really, really, really good care of Charlene.

"But if I die before I wake, I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to take."

 

:"Growing Up White"

The following is the language from the back cover of my forthcoming book, "Growing Up White - From Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter." I hope to have it available in just a few weeks.

"This is the story of the enlightenment of one young man who lived through the Civil Rights Movement, who sympathized with it, cheered for it even, loved the music of it; but who didn’t do anything significant about it.

It will take you from WW2 to Viet Nam, from the murder of Emmet Till to the integration of Little Rock Central High School and from a Black Boy Scout Camp to James Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss. It tells of our adoption of an eleven-year-old Black boy, of the mother who ran away and the church that ran away, of my rescue by a Nigerian man, and of our successful efforts to get Black foster children adopted.

In the end it asks what Jesus would do and it suggests the beginning of a solution to our current racial issues."