We Do All Rise Together

The week before Easter Sunday, Holy Week, is the most important week in my faith life. It’s that time of anticipation as I prepare to mark Christ’s death on the cross on Good Friday, await his resurrection two days later, and strive to make sense of what all of that means.

As Easter looms on the near horizon, I’m thinking a lot about the work of Operation Shoestring, and its symbolic parallels to these key parts of my faith tradition. Shoestring’s work is also about rebirth and renewal. It’s about ending the dark, cold world of injustice and inequity—the figurative winter—to make a better place for kids, their parents, and our whole community. It’s about believing in a better world…and doing everything to make that belief a reality.

For a half-century, courageous, faithful people, from all different walks of life, have sought to be part of building a better world for children and families along the southern end of Bailey Avenue here in the heart of Jackson. The work they’ve done through Operation Shoestring has kept children safe and families fed, created opportunities for parents to overcome a host of challenges, built relationships based on mutually earned trust, faced and wrestled with the scourges born of racism and poverty and, fundamentally, labored through arduous times to create something better. Or, as I like to put it, have made headway to building God’s Kingdom on earth.

While we have so far to go, we are, in fact, seeing amazingly encouraging things happening. Here in the heart of our capital city, against great odds, kids are doing better in school, parents and youth are raising their voices to make positive changes in their communities, and walls erected to keep the dysfunctional social order in place are crumbling and being replaced by transformational change and joy.

And it’s happening thanks to you, and our parents, children and youth, volunteers, donors, and everyone who believes in creating opportunities for young people and our community. This friends, like Easter, is powerful, real resurrection. Thank you for believing…and for acting on that belief.