The Cold Within

Yesterday morning I attended the 12th Annual Prayer Breakfast at SsAM (The Episcopal Church of Sts. Andrew and Matthew). The speaker was Beatrice "Bebe" Ross Coker a poet, playwright and civil rights activist who came to Delaware during the 1960's to work for the Delaware Division of Social Services.

The theme of the morning's breakfast was Moving to Christ through your gifts.

Ms. Coker spoke about her passion for taking care of and being responsible for children everywhere. Here are several of her remarks, some of which are attributable to her mother who recently died at the age of 102:

If everyone were using their gifts to be Christ's body on earth, why is the world is such a state?

Don't let your talents and skills take you where your character can't keep you.

Speak truth to power because real power is truth.

She spoke about finding your passion and praying/discerning how to use it. To those around me, I am sure that I looked like one of the bobble head's that you find on car dashboards or rear windows. Head nodding up and down with the movement of the car.

That was me, nodding up and down in agreement.

I was passionate about her passion.

However, the poem re-printed below, by James Patrick Kinney, brought tears to my eyes, goosebumps on my arms, and sadness to my heart and soul.

Six humans trapped by happenstance
In black and bitter cold.
Each one possessed a stick of wood,
Or so the story's told.

Their dying fire in need of logs,
The first woman held hers back
For on the faces around the fire,
She noticed one was black.

The next man looking cross the way
Saw one not of his church,
And couldn't bring himself to give
The fire his stick of birch.

The third man sat in tattered clothes;
He gave his coat a hitch.
Why should his log be put to use
To warm the idle rich?

The rich man just sat back and thought
Of the wealth he had in store.
And how to keep what he had earned
From the lazy poor.

The black man's face bespoke revenge
As the fire passed from his sight,
For all he saw in his stick of wood
Was a chance to spite the white.

And the last man of this forlorn group
Did naught except for gain.
Giving only to those who gave
Was how he played the game.

The logs held tight in death's still hands
Was proof of human sin.
They didn't die from the cold without,
They died from the cold within.