And what a scenario - in view of America's segregationist past, Georgia's own unique history thereabouts, my own brief sojourn in the state 26-and-a-half to 27-and-a-half years ago, and my own church's 'involvement' (or lack thereof) over the past century-and-a-half in helping black Southernors...
For beginners, for the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church - a house of worship which was longtime the home church of *Dr Martin Luther King Junior, no less - to be elected to the US Senate, is no small thing/achievement, is indeed a mini-'miracle' in itself...
*For my take upon the life story of that giant among Americans, you could check out my blogpost thereupon (on this blogsite) upon the 50th anniversary of his cold-blooded assassination in April 1968.
And as I've alluded to, from sometime in April 1993 through mid-June 1994 I lived in Georgia, or more accurately, right upon the border of two southern states, Tennessee and Georgia: at the Wildwood Lifestyle Centre and Hospital a little outside both Chattanooga and Atlanta, close to a hilly vista named Lookout Mountain, wherefrom one can apparently espy five or six different southern states: evidently the two aforementioned, plus Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and perhaps North Carolina...
Across from said health centre I worked alongside another worker/student at Wildwood named Hector (Rodriguez? if my memory serves me aright, which it usually does!), for an older (but very fit and hearty, healthy and happy) black gentleman who often visited and shopped etcetera at Wildwood, by the name of Marvin Wilson, someone who told me he'd been intending/planning to sail to New Zealand sometime though I've no idea if he ever did...
But one thing I never forgot is that he, or someone else, there told me how no black Americans lived in that particular county, borough or parish (whatever the correct term), further explanation needless as to the unspoken shadow of lynchings and the like that had ever hung menacingly over **that part of the U S since Civil War days. By which he (or whoever told me) certainly wasn't including the lifestyle centre itself, Wildwood being the home of many black Americans whether long-term workers or sojourning students like myself, as well as people from all parts of the world, many Caribbean folk among them.
**Though hardly alone, even northern 'parishes' evidently oftentimes seeing the same c/o such as the seemingly nationally-ubiquitous KKK, not to mention the never-ending small-scale 'petty discrimination' in housing and jobs in particular since reconstruction days...
Even Dr King himself condemned the easy-ozzy tendency of smug middle class white Americans, priding themselves on their own racial self-righteousness whilst looking down their noses at poor white rednecks in the South especially, to feel as if they were above such sordidness whilst often entrenching far worse endemic racial injustice in the very institutions of everyday life and times (in the 'enlightened' north and elsewhere).
King felt more sympathy for such ***'poor white trash', so to speak, whose unenviable life circumstances oftentimes saw them trapped in cycles of poverty and abuse, than he did for privileged northernors whose lives hardly ever intersected with those of their black neighbours, and if they did, they tended to emulate the infamous Levite and Priest of Jesus' famous parable of the Good Samaritan than the latter.
***Not his words as such.
So it does me no pleasure to add, but I feel the need to, that my own denomination's history is far from exemplary in such regards. Though I have no idea whatsoever and would tend to suspect that few if any of my own church's membership in the U S have ever indulged in the horrid hatemongering which has resulted in countless lynchings and the like over the many decades since the Civil War (around which time, 1863 to be exact, it was coming into being)...
...yet a woman we take to have had the prophetic gift - though she ever resiled from immodestly or pridefully declaring such on her own behalf, wishing our church membership (and outsiders) to rather evaluate from the fruit of her life and the apparent authenticity of the claims to supernatural guidance that seemed to be expressed by the life and ministry she maintained for well-nigh 70-odd years or so...
...declared on one or several occasions that she beheld in vision three moments in history wherein there was weeping in heaven...
The first of these, the tragic Fall of Adam and Eve, need hardly be explicated here, much less the second, the vision she had of all heaven in deep sorrow at the events leading up to and culminating in the shameful crucifixion of the Author of life upon Calvary's cross...
But the third may well take many aback, and even be glibly dismissed by some as hardly worthy of such, especially when viewed alongside such (especially 20th century) horrors as the Holocaust (and the Inquisition and the like of the aptly named Dark Ages)...
But, believe it or otherwise, Ellen G White beheld all heaven in tears when they looked down upon America in the days and weeks and months and years and decades (and all the rest) post-Reconstruction and saw that 'God's people' so-called were doing nothing, stuff all, to help their black southern countrymen and women...
So all God's blessings be upon Raphael Warnock - despite his apparent cozying up to the pro-choice movement: may the good LORD give Him a revelation of the evil, the holocaust, thus being enacted year after year in both America and throughout the (especially Western) world as unborn children are effectively sent wholesale to the slaughterhouse...
May he indeed fulfil his vow upon election night of working and serving on behalf of all Georgians...
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