So Very Proud

I can honestly say that I witnessed history on Tuesday night. I won't forget sitting with our House Church, and later just with Hannah and Scott, when we heard the announcement that Barack had done it. He overcame, and not because he was a token, but because he was the best. I was stunned to silence when he made his calmly profound speech to the American people, announcing that America has turned a really ugly page in its history. The remnants of discrimination and overt racism are still present in so many areas of our society, but this was a step. A step that literally shows the world that it's possible to overcome the ugliness and the barriers that people put in front of you, that it's possible to come so far from nothing, that African Americans now have the role model and the representative they deserve to have.

I'm still processing what this really means for our country, and the excitement and heaviness of this incredible event have almost been cheapened by those very remnants of discrimination and selfishness, comments that have come out of the mouths of Christians who claim to care for the forgotten but speak in hypocritical and calloused words. But we can't let that weigh down the high we should be feeling, because what happened on Tuesday was not small, especially not to the group of people who helped build this country but who have been largely forgotten at so many times.

I cried a few times on Tuesday night, but I couldn't stop tearing up at this image of Jesse Jackson, who walked with Martin Luther King, Jr., standing in silence as the announcement was made and as Barack spoke, weeping and biting his fingernails, as if he wasn't quite sure what to do with the enormity of this night:

God Bless America.