Betty and I are on travel, sort of a couples’ retreat, with two of our friends who are pastors. So, this week, I wanted to share a brief passage from my upcoming book that many of you have encouraged me to write. Please pray that God will grant us traveling mercies and that we will return safely and find all things well.

Standing on the Promises

“Sustain me, my God, according to your promise, and I will live; do not let my hopes be dashed” (Psalm 119:116 NIV)

Standing on the Promises is the book’s tentative title I hope to have published later this year. It is a colorful narrative that traces my life’s journey from dark and desperate times to the light of God’s fulfilled promises, with valuable lessons learned along the way. If you have a moment, please read the few opening paragraphs below from Chapter One and let me know your thoughts.

The brief excerpt below is from Chapter One.

Golden sunlight graced the horizon on a brilliant spring Sunday morning in April of 1965. Ah-h yes, 1965, the year the Voting Rights Act was passed, safeguarding the rights of all U. S. citizens to vote without meeting discriminatory state qualifications, such as literacy tests, poll taxes, etc.; and just one year after Jim Crow was legally ended by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Viet Nam war was heating up in Southeast Asia; Lyndon Johnson with his “War on Poverty” was being tested in his first year as the duly elected president of the United States; and a teenaged Alfred Owens, Jr. was contemplating starting a storefront church in Washington, D. C.—a church and pastor that, decades later, would have a profound and positive impact upon me. 

While walking slowly from the well pump, toting a heavy pail of fresh water into the kitchen, I watched as brightly colored orange monarch and black swallowtail butterflies glided playfully through the yard behind our old olive-green farmhouse on Springhill Farm in Enfield, North Carolina. Enfield, in 1965, was an archetypal southern town with a railroad track essentially dividing it into Black and White residential areas. Genteel colonial, Victorian, and Elizabethan homes lined streets like Franklin, Main, and Sherrod Heights on the White side of the tracks, while smaller shotgun-style houses could be found all along Dixon, Dennis, and Pope Streets on the “other” side.

Dressed in my “Sunday-best,” white shirt, red bowtie, black pants, and black shoes freshly polished with Griffin Liquid Wax, I squeezed into the car with my dad, mom, and four of my siblings—Gwendolyn, 16, the twins, Denise and Venise, 4, and Griffin, 13. My oldest brother, Jesse, Jr., was doing boot camp in the United States Army at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Helena and Louetta, my two oldest sisters, were enrolled in college at North Carolina Central University in Durham.  Since the twins, Denny and Neta, as we called them, were small, the seven of us could fit into our six-seater 1958 Pontiac Chieftain. We were about to take the twelve-mile ride through the countryside to Royal Light Holiness Church of Deliverance in Tillery…. 

Inside the sanctuary, previously the old Shady Grove Elementary School’s auditorium, I fixed my eyes on the slender gentleman with caramel brown skin and a slowly receding hairline standing behind the small oakwood table in the front of the room. Most of the congregants, like the slaves in the antebellum south, had spent Monday through Saturday laboring in the fields on sharecropping farms and were grateful for a day to rest and worship. With his hands stretched toward the congregation, [Uncle FG] motioned for us to stand, then led us in singing our unofficial Sunday School anthem: “Standing on the Promises.” I wondered silently what the promises were and when they would be fulfilled.

(The full book is expected to be published later this year!) 

(My baby sisters, the twins, Denny & Neta standing beside our 1958 Pontiac Chieftain with the farmhouse in the background circa 1965) 

Focus Quote: “The Lord is trustworthy in all he promises and faithful in all he does” (Psalm 145:13).

Project 2024: “If My people who are called by my name would humble themselves and pray…”

Also, please do not neglect to VOTE in November!

And please continue to join us at 5:14 p.m. each day as we pause to pray.

“Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us” (1 John 5:14).