Why we Started Move it Forward Monday our IG Live Series
We don’t have to tell you the world is a dark place - particularly now. Several years into a pandemic, and collectively, we are dealing with everything from accelerating climate change to issues of racial justice, police brutality, violence against women, people with disabilities, and our LGBTQ+ siblings, all of this alongside the banning of books, a growing chorus of conservatives who deny history for their own comfort, and finally, the troubling rise of Christian nationalism.
In this atmosphere, it can be easy to lose hope and give in to despair. But scripture tells us to pitch our tent in the land of hope (Acts 2:26) and also speak out against injustice (Proverbs 31:8-9) as we center love, justice and mercy (Micah 6:8).
Move it Forward Monday, our Instagram Live series, is about cultivating space to be in conversation with folks who are making a difference in their communities… folks who have said NO to the status quo and YES to creating change.
Our monthly chats on Instagram (@PrayWithOurFeet) give folks 1-2 tangible steps they can take, in the immediate, to also make a difference where they are… whether it’s through financially supporting an org., volunteering, signing a petition, or attending a workshop / event.
Being neutral is an illusion, the truth is our actions either center liberation or oppression. And it’s clear our call as believers and individuals who want to transform the world around us is to work towards a world where ALL of us are free, not simply the privileged few. I think often of the words of our ancestral freedom fighters who have gone before us; their lives a testament to resistance, an unwillingness to allow their minds to become colonized under the guise of “assimilation.”
And I see part of our work as being willing to sit with this wisdom, allowing it to become mantras, guides, for our own work in the world. I’m sharing a few of my favorite insights - everyone from James Baldwin (y’all know I love a good Baldwin quote) to Grace Lee Boggs and Father Thomas Keating below:
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
-James Baldwin
Our first guest next month is our series collaborator and my dear friend, Rowana Abbensetts Dobson, a wordsmith and editor from Brooklyn, NY; she is the founder of Spoken Black Girl magazine and community which amplifies the voices of Black women writers for mental health awareness; Rowana is a spiritual entrepreneur, writer, speaker, creative, wife and mother who is making a tremendous impact in the world! Her fiction and poetry have been published in Obsidian Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Moko Magazine, Free Verse, Late Fee, and many other publications.