How often do we see faith in action like this today?

“Sunday, March 25, 1866

Another Sabbath has passed away…This afternoon [I] attended [the] Baptist meeting, but it proved to be mostly a business meeting. They are raising money to buy a lot and build a church as they will most likely be deprived of the liberty of worshipping where they now assemble in process of time, in the basement of the white people’s church. Brother Stringer has sent to Methodist preachers and it seems likely to make some trouble for them.”

-Mary Jane Edwards, Jackson, Mississippi

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In this excerpt from her Reconstruction diary as a teacher of freedmen, Mary Jane awaits word about her assignment in the Jackson – where she and her sister, my great-great-grandmother, Lizzie, have been sent to work, only to find that they have no schoolhouses!

While they wait, feeling discouraged and somewhat extraneous, Mary Jane visits a freedmen Baptist church service. It turns out to reveal a microcosm of all the discord, turmoil, and tension happening in the South.

In response to the local whites reclaiming the Sunday meeting space they’d once offered to the Blacks, the freedmen tackle the situation head-on. They implement plans to build their own church, believing that they can do it – even though they know it may create trouble.

Such is the power of faith!

When was the last time you saw people take their faith – and their fate – into their own hands like this?