I Will Keep Walking into Samaria pt. 1

This year has been full of painful transitions—transitions I have wrestled with, questioned God about, and ones that have caused some of my friends to question me too. These moments of change have pushed me into seasons of loneliness and uncertainty. But when I pray, God always leads me on a journey of reflection, helping me to understand why I am here. This piece reveals the thought process I went through during a recent season of discouragement to remember why God led me to a new church (McLean Bible Church) and to work at a non-HBCU (Catholic University). This season of change has been emotionally hard, and only God could have led me to leave the church my father founded and my brother now serves as head pastor. Only GOD could have led me to find a home at Catholic University, not Howard University, a place that has always been so dear to my heart. When on a difficult life journey—one that is filled with confusion, loneliness, uncertainty, and fear about how people will see you—it is necessary to go back and remember ALL that God has done, so that you can find peace in being in the will of God when the storms of uncertainty blow around you.

I’ve shared before how it was my dad who first taught me the importance of doing my part to bring racial healing. In the 1990s, he attended a Promise Keepers gathering and came back glowing, telling my mom, brother, and me about the experience—how powerful it was to pray, worship, and unite with his White brothers in Christ.

My dad carried the weight of a lifetime of racism. He remembered the knife pressed to his side just for sitting next to a White man on a bus. He remembered being prohibited from participating in his college graduation because of his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. These scars were deep and unhealed. But something about that conference awakened a fire in him—a fire that still burns today.

I believe God began working on my father’s heart about racial reconciliation within the Christian community long before that conference—when my parents made the decision to enroll my brother and me in Christian schools. At the time, many of our Black family and friends questioned this choice. Why not enroll us in the local D.C. public schools? Choosing predominantly White Christian schools—many of which were originally formed to avoid desegregation—felt like a betrayal.

But when my parents gave their lives to Christ shortly after I was born, they became fully committed to weaving our faith into every part of life. Sometimes that meant stepping into communities that weren’t necessarily welcoming to Black people. I personally would have struggled to make such a decision—but I understood their hearts. They used to say, “We can teach our children the truth about racism and their heritage, but we want them in a place where they’re learning about Jesus every day.”

It wasn’t about favoring White people or clinging to a Whitewashed version of Christ. My parents saw their decision as a chance to shine light into dark places. I remember my dad teaching us about the curse of Ham and how to refute it when it came up in school. He showed us the African presence in the Bible so we could push back against the lies of a racially sanitized gospel. And he always made it clear: “If anyone sends you to the principal’s office for standing up for what’s right, they better call me first.”

They did. Often. And every time, my parents showed up within the hour, ready to challenge the leadership with the truth of God’s Word—truth that denounced racism and rejected a distorted Christianity that excluded Blackness. Once, my brother and I were even dismissed from a school over this. But my parents didn’t walk away. They rallied other Black families and protested until we were let back in.

To some, it seemed like an unnecessary fight. Why stay in spaces where we weren’t wanted? Why not just leave? But my parents weren’t fighting to be accepted. They were fighting for the truth—that God is no respecter of persons, that He so loved the world. They weren’t fighting for seats at the table. They were fighting to rescue Christianity from the clutches of racist theology.

Why would they stay in these places where hatred, married to Christian theology, birthed a false doctrine of White supremacy and Black inferiority? Because they believed in the Word. And they felt called to hold the Church accountable for the racism that was so pervasive in it—racism that was born in it as slavery spread across the globe. The Church needed a way to ease the guilt of enslaving, beating, and raping another human being—and so it twisted Scripture into a doctrine that justified it. My parents stayed to confront that lie with truth.

I watched them fight—and that fight planted seeds in me.

My dad went on to become the first Black board member of Washington Bible College, and the first Black pastor to pray at my school’s graduation. My mom became the first Black D.C. director of Child Evangelism Fellowship—an organization where, when she started, no one would even sit with her at conferences. While at the conferences she would eat alone, enduring racist jokes and cold shoulders. Why stay? Why endure it? Because they believed in the Word. They believed they were called to hold the Church accountable for its sins and to help free it from the legacy of slavery and supremacy that had taken root in its theology….(Continue to part 2)