Tag Archives: Christmas

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All I Want for Christmas is a New Boo…


Hello World,

Now that the turkey has been eaten, the family and friends have traveled back to locations near and far and Black Friday 2012 has come and gone, the Christmas season has officially started…And we all know that Christmas is the first of the trifecta of holidays (Christmas, New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day) that really are nice to be booed up…And if you don’t have one, my friends Lamar & Ronnie Tyler, founders of BlackandMarriedWithKids.com and Ebony Magazine Power 100 honorees, really want to help you with that…

This Wednesday from 6-9 p.m., come on out to “Love & Life in Atlanta” (you know dating in the A is tricky at best…) at Organix Food Lounge….Be a part of a panel discussion featuring some of Atlanta’s top love and relationships experts including Dr. Sherry L. Blake from “Braxton Family Values” and others. Check out the flyer below for all the details!

To buy tickets, please click on this link – LoveLifeAtlanta.Eventbrite.com.

Any thoughts?

 

 

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Not Every Black Person Believes in God…

Hello World,

It’s funny (funny peculiar, not funny haha) that Christ often gets lost in the hustle and bustle of preparing for Christmas, but it’s true…And it’s also true that black people are known in this country for having an unshakeable belief in God that brought us through slavery and other historical hardships and continues to sustain us today…But more and more black people are admitting that they frankly do not believe in Jesus Christ or God, which is especially poignant at this time of the year…

Tommie Shelby

Tommie Shelby, professor of African and African-American studies and of philosophy at Harvard University, recently shared why he is a black atheist on theroot.com in his essay “I Didn’t Lose Faith. I Just Don’t Have It.”

Below are a few excerpts from his essay…

And so one day, after much study, I joined a church and was baptized. Soon I was earnestly sharing the gospel with family and friends. I lived at home during the summer after my freshman year, and my mother and I studied together. As a result, her faith was renewed. Indeed, she held tightly to her faith until the day she died.

I can’t say the same for myself. By the time I graduated, I no longer believed in God. I didn’t get to this place easily. It was a painful and trying process that involved hours of study, reflection, self-examination, fasting and prayer.

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I worried that my belief in God was ultimately rooted in things like fear of death, desire for community or longing for the loving father figure I didn’t have. Was my attraction to Christian doctrines driven by the fact that I was a lonely, alienated, scared kid looking for something firm to hold on to? After all, faith made me feel powerful and protected.

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I’m an intellectual, by natural disposition and vocation. I have chosen to live a life of the mind in a community of scholars where my nonbelief is unremarkable. My path is not for everyone. And I don’t expect most black folk to leave the Lord. What I would like to see, though, is greater respect for and understanding toward the nonbelievers among us. If my mother could muster it, surely we all can.

Another black atheist, Jamila Bey,  shares how she celebrates the Christmas holidays without Christ in her essay “Heathen Holidays: An Atheist Celebrates”also on the root.com.

Jamila Bey

So what do I think of the views of the Shelby and Bey as an unabashed believer in Jesus Christ? Well, first of all,  I very much value the freedoms on which this country was based – one of which is the freedom of religion….We are free to believe in whatever God we choose to believe in, and we are also free to choose to not believe in any God at all…So I say – have at it Shelby and Bey…

But I will also say this…the freedoms (religious and otherwise) that Shelby and Bey enjoy today in this country are the result of courageous black Christians down through the years that sacrified – many with their lives – so that we can be as free as we want to be today…it is a real luxury for Shelby and Bey to say they don’t believe in Jesus Christ in today’s times…

Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are just few black people whose lives and Christian faith enabled us to enjoy the freedoms we so cavalierly enjoy today…I’m not sure that Shelby and Bey would be of the same opinion years ago…not hatin’ just sayin’…

What say you?

Any thoughts?

 

 

 

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Love Actually…

Hello World!!!

I have missed you sooo much! I’ve been working on a freelance assignment that has been sucking all of my creative juice and left me little time to wax whimsical on this blog. But this morning, I have put my foot down. I must write. You need for me to write…not hardly, I know. I need for me to write….

Anywho, if you haven’t noticed (I’m sure that you have.), it is now “the most wonderful time of the year” also known as the Christmas season. It is the season that everyone races each other in the malls to see who can get the biggest and brightest baubles and assemble them under the Christmas tree. It is the season in which families strive to put grudges aside to have that perfect Christmas. It is the season in which you are likely to hear the strains of Christmas music everywhere you go whether you want to or not. It is the season that new couples fall into like, lust or love. It is the season that old couples rekindle old flames. It is the seasons of really good Christmas plays and really awful ones. It is the season in which we are celebrate the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ!

I love Christmas! I really do, but if you’re anything like me, you can get lost in the festivity and by the time January rolls around, you wonder if you’ve even remembered much less pondered the real “reason for the season.” Being the romantic that I am, my mind always drifts to love during this season. I would like to say that I am thinking about the love of Jesus, but the Lord knows my heart…I am typically thinking of the love between a man and woman and how nice it would be to experience all of the sights and sounds of Christmas with my boo.

I remember one Christmas in my ’20s, I was dating this creative type. (I won’t tell what type of creativity he dabbles in lest those who know me guess the identity of this man.) Actually, we had just started dating that November to our surprise. (We were friends and happened to fall onto each other’s lips one night!) Anyway, it was all turning out beautifully. He escorted me to my company Christmas party without me having to twist his arm. We drove all around Atlanta going to malls and looking at stuff. Neither of us had very much money then so a lot of our dates consisted of window shopping.

We weren’t actually going to see each other on Christmas day as my family typically travels to see family. But I asked him to come over just before we left because I wanted to give him a gift. I wasn’t sure if he had gotten me anything, but I hoped he had. Since we had just started dating a month earlier, I wasn’t sure what to get him. If I got him something fairly expensive, he might think that I was into him too much. And if I didn’t get him something fairly nice, he might think that I didn’t care very much about him at all. I think I got him a couple of gifts. One of them was a skull cap. I used to date hip hop guys back then so it fit into his wardrobe. It was personal without being too personal, I figured. I could hardly wait to see his gift for me and figure out what it meant.

Within the first chime of the doorbell, I opened the door to let my creative type in. After exchanging a few pleasantries, we exchanged gifts. And we opened them in front of each other. He really liked my gift. His gift to me, however, left me unable to speak for a minute. He got me the “The Best of Donny Hathaway” tape. He instructed me to listen specifically to  “A Song for You.” His gift had trumped mine as far as meaning and intention. Just in the few months I had known him, I knew that that Donny Hathaway was one of his favorite, if not all time favorite, singers. As soon as he left, I listened to the song in my Walkman. Here are a few lines from the song.

I love you in a place where there’s no space or time
I love you for in my life you are a friend of mine
And when my life is over
Remember when we were together
We were alone and I was singing this song for you
We were alone and I was singing this song for you

Y’all know I was so gone, right?  I knew he wasn’t saying that he loved me or anything, but I knew he could go there. To this day, it was the best gift I’ve ever received from a guy! (Shoot, maybe I need to go back to creative types!)

But I know that romantic love isn’t the reason for the season although it’s a wonderful time to be in love. The reason for the season as well know is Jesus! This verse gets me in the proper Christmas mood!

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.

James 1:17

I suspect that that being in a long-term romantic love relationship is similar to having a lifelong relationship with the Father. You have to find new ways to jazz it up or it gets boring and stale. Here’s the truth of the matter. I’ve been in and witnessed countless Christmas plays. The whole Nativity scene…just doesn’t do it for me really. (Please don’t throw rocks at me!)  A few years back, I decided that instead of focusing on God’s gift to all of us, Jesus, I would focus on giving gifts back to Him. I decided that I would give Him three gifts – one for the Father, one for the Son and one for the Holy Spirit. Of course, I cannot physically hand gifts to the Father, but I do come up with ways to show that I care for Him and others. I won’t tell you exactly how lest I be guilty of Matthew 6:1-4. I don’t do this every Christmas, but when I have, I feel an overwhelming love in my chest that even trumps romantic love. I wonder if it is an inkling of what the Father feels for us…

I doubt I will experience romantic love this Christmas. Some would say this is a choice I’ve made, but I won’t get into that here.  🙂 But I do plan to experience love this Christmas – the love that you feel when you focus on giving rather than receiving.

To borrow a line from my favorite Christmas move, “Love Actually,” “if you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.”

I so love Christmas!

Any Thoughts?

P.S. A friend of mine recently told me that Christmas songs after 1985 are no good. That may be generally true, but I love this one! And it came out in 1994! Thanks MC!