Walking To JerusalemSample

Bethlehem – The City of Beginnings

I was born and raised in a big city, but in a section that was akin to a small town. Four major roads in my community—Washington Street, Dorchester Avenue, Warren Street, and Blue Hill Avenue—formed the axis of my entire world and defined the parameters of my existence. Boston, Massachusetts, is a city of neighborhoods, each one a separate small world unto itself built around class and ethnic affinity.

The people my age all graduated from the same high school that was just a few blocks from the elementary schools where we learned to play basketball. We grew up going to the same corner stores and bodegas, where the shop owners knew us by name and favorite snack. Generations of families made up the faithful members of the same churches and social clubs. You might have worked downtown, but you shopped, ate, dated, married, and worshipped in your neighborhood.

The dreams that began there in my small community may not have been big enough to take me beyond the city limits, but they were the seeds of purpose God planted in me. The first step to fulfilling your own purpose is to allow God to challenge the parameters of your own perception—to give the Creator permission to push you to imagine a world outside of your understanding.

Perhaps you will never physically venture beyond the borders of your small town, but your mind is far too powerful to be bound to any particular zip code, neighborhood, block, or street. Once you give God permission to enlarge your vision, you can begin to dream.

Many people die having never lived. The graveyards are rich with the potential of great people who died with a small-town mentality and never released all they had inside. I was headed that way. I was Roxbury born and Roxbury bred and believed when I died I would be Roxbury dead, just as all the other children I grew up with. Similarly, I don’t believe David dreamed beyond the pastures of Bethlehem to the royal palaces he would rule one day.

I thought I might be a police officer like my father; no other idea or image ever came into my mind. I didn’t know of anyone who had left our community to become a world evangelist. No one in my neighborhood had written books, traveled, or spoken to large groups. I had never even seen a black evangelist on television or heard one on the radio. I knew that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had come to Boston to be educated, but he didn't live on my block. Dr. King had been assassinated the year I was born and lived on only in effigy on the walls of black folks’ kitchens and on our church hand fans. The neighborhood had been burned down on the night of his death, and his dream seemed as impossible to me as flying without wings. I had no idea that one day I would be a preacher and travel the world. My whole world was my own small town.