Before we can rebuild our families, our communities, or our world, we must first believe that we are worthy of love.
What if the revolution we have been waiting for is love?
Not romantic love.
Not performative love.
Not love as a slogan, a hashtag, or something we say because it sounds beautiful.
I mean a love so radical that it changes the way we live.
Because when you truly love yourself, you take responsibility for yourself.
You feed your body because you believe your body is worth nourishing.
You feed your mind because you believe your mind is worth developing.
You feed your spirit because you believe your spirit is worth protecting.
You care for your health. You protect your peace. You honor your gifts. You become intentional about the life you are building because somewhere inside yourself you have accepted a fundamental truth:
I am worth the effort.
And when you don’t believe you are worthy of love, it becomes difficult to consistently give yourself the care you need.
Why invest in something you don’t value?
Why protect something you don’t believe is precious?
Why nurture something you have been taught to despise?
And if I cannot recognize the value in my own humanity, how can I consistently recognize the value in yours?
That is why the revolution begins within.
Before we talk about rebuilding the Black family, strengthening the Black community, building Black institutions, protecting Black children, circulating Black dollars or creating generational wealth, perhaps we have to begin with a much more intimate question:
Do I love me?
Not the version of me that performs well for everybody else.
Not the version of me that learned how to survive.
Not the version of me that makes everybody comfortable.
Me.
Can I acknowledge who I am—all of me—and decide that this human being is worthy of love?
Because once I understand that I am worthy, I can begin to understand that you are worthy too.
Then love begins to move.
From self to family.
From family to neighbor.
From neighbor to community.
From community to a people.
And that is when love becomes revolutionary.
I KNOW BECAUSE I HAVE LIVED IT
I was talking to my friend Anthony about ego when I suddenly began to cry.
I told him that I can sit here today and tell you that I am great without that greatness having to be a proclamation of ego.
Because I know where it comes from.
Everything I have done, everything I have built, everything I have survived, and everything I have been entrusted with, I acknowledge God in it.
I believe I have been guided and led by the Holy Spirit every step of the way.
So I don’t have to deny what is extraordinary about my life in order to prove that I am humble.
I can acknowledge the gift while acknowledging the Giver.
I know the Source.
And when I said that to Anthony, I began to cry.
Because for a moment, I became intensely aware of where I had come from.
There was a time when I gave my body to other men just so I could have somewhere to stay.
There was a time when I did drugs because I wanted to numb the pain of not knowing where my life was going.
There was a time when I did not know what direction to take.
I know what it feels like to survive without knowing where survival is taking you.
And I also know what begins to happen when you learn to love yourself.
You begin to find direction.
You begin to find peace.
You begin to find joy that nobody can take from you.
You begin to find yourself.
You begin to find your voice.
And once you know what you know because you have lived it, nobody in heaven or hell can steal that knowledge from you.
I know what I know because I have a personal experience with God.
I have touch points.
I can look backward across my life and remember the moments when God provided.
I can remember doors opening.
I can remember being redirected.
I can remember being gifted.
I can remember moments when I didn’t understand how something was going to happen—and somehow the provision appeared.
Even something as simple as the grand piano sitting in my home carries a testimony for me.
I’ve had two of them.
Two grand pianos.
And I know what those pianos mean to me because I know where I came from.
They are touch points.
They remind me that I have watched God “open the windows of heaven, and pour out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.”
I don’t know that scripture merely because somebody preached it to me.
I know it because I have lived long enough to watch it happen.
There.
God provided.
There.
God protected me.
There.
God redirected me.
There.
God gifted me.
There.
When I couldn’t see the road ahead, God directed my path.
“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”
Every morning.
At breakfast.
At lunch.
At dinner.
My family would say that scripture.
“In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths.”
We said it over and over and over again.
And I had no idea what that scripture truly meant.
For decades, I was speaking those words over myself without knowing that one day I would have to live them.
Trust in the Lord with all thine heart.
I didn’t know there would be moments when trusting God would be all I had.
Lean not unto thine own understanding.
I didn’t know there would be seasons when absolutely nothing about my life would make sense to me.
In all thy ways acknowledge Him.
I didn’t know I would one day look backward over my life and see His hand in places where, at the time, I thought I had been abandoned.
And He shall direct thy paths.
I didn’t know how many times I would lose my sense of direction only to discover that God was directing me somewhere I could not yet see.
But the Word had already been planted.
Morning.
Noon.
Night.
Again.
And again.
And again.
For decades.
The Bible says of God’s Word:
“It shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.”
And now I understand.
Those words did not return void.
They were working in me before I understood them.
They were being planted before I knew I would need them.
What I thought was simply a scripture my family recited became a roadmap for my life.
I had been speaking direction over myself before I knew I would become lost.
I had been speaking trust over myself before I knew my faith would be tested.
I had been speaking surrender over myself before I understood what surrender would cost.
And I had been acknowledging God before I could possibly understand all the places He would eventually lead me.
The Word did not return void.
I became the testimony of what I had been speaking all along.
And I discovered something through surrender.
When you begin to love yourself, you stop fighting so desperately to become somebody else.
You surrender the shame.
You surrender the version of yourself that was created merely to survive.
You surrender the belief that what happened to you determines what you deserve.
You surrender the need to numb yourself.
You surrender the need to apologize for existing.
You surrender your will.
And you allow yourself to be led.
That is where I found my voice.
That is where I found my peace.
That is where I found my joy.
That is where I began to find me.
And now I can stand fully inside who I am and say:
I am gifted.
I am powerful.
I am worthy.
I am great.
Not because I believe I am greater than somebody else.
Not because I believe I created myself.
And certainly not because I believe I got here alone.
I can acknowledge who I am because every time I acknowledge the gift, I can point back toward the Giver.
Only God.
That is not ego.
That is testimony.
LOVE MUST BECOME RESPONSIBILITY
This is where our conversation about love has to become bigger than ourselves.
Because love cannot remain an emotion.
Love must become responsibility.
If I love myself, I care for myself.
If I love my child, I show up for my child.
If I love my neighbor, their wellbeing matters to me.
If I love my community, I cannot be indifferent to what happens to it.
If I love Black people, then Black children I did not create still matter to me.
Black elders I am not related to still matter to me.
Black businesses I do not own still matter to me.
Black dreams that are not mine still matter to me.
Your liberation matters to me because I have learned that my humanity and yours are connected.
Imagine what happens when an entire community begins operating from that understanding.
My life is valuable.
Your life is valuable.
Our children are valuable.
Our elders are valuable.
Our neighborhoods are valuable.
Our dreams are valuable.
Our future is valuable.
Love begins to have an economic consequence.
We invest in one another.
Love begins to have an educational consequence.
We teach and mentor our children.
Love begins to have a health consequence.
We take care of our bodies because we believe we deserve to be here.
Love begins to have a spiritual consequence.
We feed our spirits instead of constantly feeding our wounds.
Love begins to have a community consequence.
We stop asking, “What does that have to do with me?”
Because our answer becomes:
Everything.
None of this means that every struggle in the Black community exists because somebody failed to love themselves.
Racism is real.
Poverty is real.
Trauma is real.
Housing instability is real.
Inadequate healthcare and underfunded schools are real.
Love does not magically erase systems of inequality.
Love gives us a reason to confront them together.
And perhaps that is precisely why love is so powerful.
A people who love themselves become much harder to convince that they deserve less.
A people who love one another become much harder to divide.
A people who love their children will build for generations they may never live to see.
A people who love their community will create institutions instead of waiting for somebody else to rescue them.
And a people who recognize their own worth will eventually begin demanding that the world recognize it too.
We do not have to agree about everything.
We do not have to share identical politics.
We do not have to worship the same way.
We do not have to come from the same neighborhoods, have the same education, love the same people, dress the same way, speak the same way or dream the same dreams.
But we can make one fundamental agreement:
We will not casually discard one another.
We can disagree without dehumanizing one another.
We can correct without destroying one another.
We can celebrate another person’s greatness without believing it diminishes our own.
We can make room.
We can protect.
We can build.
We can love.
And it begins with one person deciding:
I am worthy of my own love.
Because when I recognize the sacredness of the life inside of me, I become capable of recognizing the sacredness of the life inside of you.
Then you recognize it in somebody else.
And somebody else recognizes it in another.
Until self-love becomes family love.
Family love becomes community love.
Community love becomes collective power.
And collective power changes the world.
Perhaps we have spent too much time waiting for the revolution to arrive.
Perhaps it has been waiting inside us all along.
Waiting for us to heal enough to recognize it.
Waiting for us to surrender enough to receive it.
Waiting for us to become courageous enough to give it away.
The revolution is not hatred.
The revolution is not division.
The revolution is not discovering another enemy.
The revolution begins when we finally decide that our lives—and one another’s lives—are worth caring for.
Love yourself.
Love your brother.
Love your sister.
Love our children.
Love our elders.
Love our community.
Then build like everything you love is worth saving.
Because it is.
LOVE IS THE REVOLUTION
