The CHURCH OFFICE will be closed on Monday, June 20th in recognition on Juneteenth.
Juneteenth (short for “June Nineteenth”) marks the day when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 to take control of the state and ensure that all enslaved people be freed. The troops’ arrival came a full two and a half years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Juneteenth honors the end to slavery in the United States and is considered the longest-running African American holiday.
Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox Court House two months earlier in Virginia, but slavery had remained relatively unaffected in Texas—until U.S. General Gordon Granger stood on Texas soil and read General Orders No. 3: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”
DEVOTION
Howard Thurman was a great theologian and writer in the first half of the 1900’s. Howard Thurman was born and raised in Daytona Beach, FL. He was the grandson of enslaved people and grew up in a highly segregated community. He was a brilliant student and excelled to receive many degrees and teach in prestigious universities in the U.S. Thurman's theology of radical nonviolence influenced and shaped a generation of civil rights activists, and he was a key mentor to leaders within the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr.
This is a poem / prayer by Howard Thurman.
I Need Thy Sense of Time
Always I have an underlying anxiety about things.
Sometimes I am in a hurry to achieve my ends and am completely without patience.
It is hard for me to realize that some growth is slow,
That all processes are not swift.
I cannot always discriminate between what takes time to develop and what can be rushed,
Because my sense of time is dulled.
I measure things in terms of happenings.
O to understand the meaning of perspective that I may do all things with a profound sense of leisure – of time.
I Need Thy Sense of Order
The confusion of the details of living is sometimes overwhelming.
The little things keep getting in my way providing ready-made excuses for failure to do and be what I know I ought to do and be.
Much time is spent on things that are not very important
While significant things are put into an insignificant place in my scheme of order.
I must unscramble my affairs so that my life will become order.
O God, I need thy sense of order.
I Need Thy Sense of the Future
Teach me to know that life is ever on the side of the future.
Keep alive in me the forward look, the high hope, the onward surge.
Let me not be frozen either by the past or the present.
Grant me, O patient Father, thy sense of the future without which all life would sicken and die.
- From Deep is the Hunger by Howard Thurman.
Blessings
Pastor Tom
