Today marks the one year anniversary of my beginning The Daily Race. I have pondered what I would say when I reached this milestone and I didn’t have the words until now. There’s only one thing that I can do. The songwriter says, “As I look back over my life and I think things over. I can truly say that I’ve been blessed. I have a testimony.” I, fellow runners, want to testify.

I first give honor to God who is the strength of my life, to His Son and my example of sacrificial love and to the Holy Spirit for its guiding and penetrating truths that have begun to unravel this tightly bound soul. I thank God for setting my feet on this path toward race-lessness, for walking and talking with me along the way. I thank God for the angel sent to wrestle with me until I received this new name: post- racial liberation theology. I am grateful for the great cloud of witnesses and for those that I have met on this side of heaven, for all of the words that I have met and the ideas we’ve shared.

I have yet to comprehend the breadth and depth and width of my humanity, the expansive nature and meaning of the presence of the divine in me as a believer. It is too deep for me to understand God’s unconditional love because of my racial conditioning. But, I want to love all of God’s children without prejudice. I want to see more of me/you and less of race. And I am grateful for the glimpses of it, for the awareness that it exists and that it is, indeed, possible through Jesus Christ, our Lord. It is this vision, this promise that I am running toward.

Like the Samaritan woman who dropped her water pot, I have dropped race to run and tell everyone that I see to “Come see a man who told me all about myself and never once mentioned race.” I have been filled, I have been satisfied from the inside out. And I can’t keep it to myself. I just have to tell it.

I close with a poem that I shared with a women’s group through a spiritual community covenant to T.E.S.T.I.F.Y.: Telling Every Story To Internally Free You. The poem is titled “Tell It” and I encourage you to do just that:

Tell it! Tell it!

Open your mouth, child

There’s something in there

Say it without hesitation

Share it without reservation

Shoo that cat away

Because your tongue is nothing to play with

This is your story so you must…

 

Tell it! Tell it!

Open your mouth, girl

There’s someone in there

Don’t worry about who won’t like it

Don’t matter who gets mad

Talk about it

Scream it 

Shout it

Because there will come a day when you’ll wish you had so…

 

Tell it! Tell it!

Open your mouth, woman

It’s time now to release it

You’ve held it long enough

Nursing pain, cloaking shame

Won’t give your life permission to feel 

But, closing your mouth doesn’t allow the wound to heal

So, tell it!