Caught In The Rain

To date this or mark time on this blog, on May 19th, 2013 (Malcolm X's birthday by the way), I read Joshua 3 and in the 7th and 8th verse, God tells the leaders to stand still in the Jordan river and walk through it till the river dries up, but its not drying up till they start walking through the waters.  As a coincidence, if there is such a thing, President Obama gave a commencement speech at the Morehouse graduation in Atlanta, Georgia.  The interesting thing is, here in Atlanta, the rain came and came and came.  And the 2013 Morehouse men graduating class, sat in the rain, as men, as leaders, listening to the words of wisdom from the President Obama. 

Now, the usual speech any Christian or motivational speaker would give at this point is, "rain will come but you have to go through it in order to get what you want," and yes, that is the truth.  But lets dig deeper here:  these men, Joshua's men and the 2012 Morehouse men, had to stand and get drenched in the water and lead the way so that others behind them could cross on dry ground.  See, whatever rain and water we have to go through may not even guarantee that we will always get the sunny weather and dry ground afterwards but people that come behind us will have those opportunities. 

The thing is, its up to us to walk through it.  If we do not walk through it, those waters will never open up for us and for those coming behind us.  God, if we had not notice, is all about making and leaving legacies so that people will have standards and goals to aspire to.  In Joshua 4, people took 12 stones and built a memorial so that generations to come would know where they are going and where they have come from.  At the same token, Morehouse class of 2013, made a mark for future generations, especially young black men, to follow and that is, by any means necessary, through rain, through flood, through fire, through brimstone, through whatever God leads me through, we have to go through it not only for my personal success, but for the success of generations that follow.

To close, in Joshua 5: 9, God said to the Joshua, "This day have I rolled away the reproach of Egypt from off you."  I bring that up to point out that Joshua and the people he led probably felt the shame of being slaves and to bring it up to current times, those Morehouse graduates probably felt some type of way knowing they had to sit out in the rain for their graduation.  But in that moment, then and now, God made a change and says, we no longer have to be ashamed of what we had to go through to get to our expected end.  Our journeys may not have always been the prettiest and brightest circumstances but God being the Master Artist, wanted to bring us to a point of completion or perfection, and any artist can tell us that any great work takes messy and ugly details but when it is over, those ugly moments were needed to get the desired result.