by Dijorn Moss
“I surrender to God, and I want to be what God wants me to be.” Dwight collapsed to his knees under the weight of the words. Will and Jamal took a knee with him as he prayed.
“Lord, I know I’ve done messed up, and I ain’t got much to show for with my life. But I’m here, and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to be close to you and make you proud of me,” Dwight prayed.
Dwight continued to pray until he could no longer kneel, and when that happened, he lay face down on the floor and prayed some more, until the conference room carpet was stained with his sweat and tears. He thought about his mother’s, who loved him and had done the best she could for him, and how he had rejected her love for the sake of being cool. He thought about all those times he could’ve died at the wrong place and the wrong time. Nothing he had done up until this point was worthy of grace and forgiveness. Dwight did not feel worthy of a second chance, but he had one. He prayed through the pain, and it seemed like the more sweat and tears poured out, the more release he felt from his past.
He felt weak and powerful at the same time, but Dwight had been reborn without reentering the womb. Dwight felt like shouting. It was as if he had been born for the first time, and he knew that his life would never be the same.
Chapter Twenty-two
Titus
Titus was in the middle of a card game with his staff when a knock on the door alerted him that he had an impromptu visitor. One of Titus’s armor bearers got up.
“I got it.” Titus motioned for his armor bearer to sit down. Titus made it to the door after a second set of knocks. He opened the door and saw Will on the other side.
“Pastor, I know you’re busy, but I really need to talk with you,” Will said.
“Sure.” Titus gave Will a head nod and stepped aside and let him enter the hotel room.
Need was not a word that Titus was accustomed to hearing from Will. Titus dismissed his staff and took a seat at the table, where Will already sat.
“So what’s going on, Will?”
“Man, I just don’t know what to do with my family. I feel like giving up and turning them over to God.”
“Well, I agree with turning them over to God, but I’m not sure about giving up on your family.”
“What am I supposed to do? I try real hard to help them, but at what cost? I’m literally risking my life just to see them, and they don’t want to get right.”
For someone as young as Will to possess so much passion for his family was impressive. Titus had discovered a long time ago that he lived in an age where children grew more and more indifferent. Respect for family had dissipated, and respect for elders was nonexistent.
“I mean, my family takes me places where I’m not trying to go,” Will added.
“What do you mean?” Titus asked.
“I mean, I used to be a real hot-head. I blamed my family, because love seemed to dwell everywhere else but in our home. So I used to walk around with this mentality that if you said something to me, then that was it. We were throwing them.” Will started to shadowbox. “Ever since I gave my life over to God, I feel like I got this anger boiling over and at any minute I can lose it.”
“That means that there are aspects of your life that you have not given over to God. Listen to me.” Titus tapped Will on the knee to get his attention. “Every sin, every failure, every imperfection or misplaced emotion, every inadequate feeling you have, Christ placed those on the cross with Him and they died with Him. You don’t have to feel like you’re going to lose it, because what you have gained is far greater.”
Will put his head down, and Titus was not sure if it was because of the weight of his problems or shame about his feelings. Titus gave him time to think and meditate on what he had said.
“How do I let go of what my family did to me? I want to love them. I want to be a family, but I don’t know what to do,” Will said as he lifted his head up.
“You, of all people, should know. Wasn’t it you who held one of my most dedicated members at gunpoint and forced him to bring you to last year’s retreat? Weren’t you the same person who turned his life around and gave his life over to God?”
“Yeah,” Will said with a smirk.
“The same God who brought you out of darkness into light is just as capable of doing the same thing with your family. You just have to be an instrument of peace, love and, above all, forgiveness. God will work it out.”
“Thank you so much, Pastor.” Will stood up and extended his hand.
“I’m very proud of you,” Titus said as he shook Will’s hand. “Listen, I needed to step out for a minute to take care of a few things before the next service.”
“No problem,” Will said as he headed toward the door.
Titus followed Will out the door and made his way toward the lobby. He was excited about the breakthrough he had just had with Will. Titus felt motivated for tonight’s service. He entered the lobby with Will, and everything went into slow motion. His eyes focused on a strikingly tall figure. It can’t be.
“Will, I’m going to have to catch up with you later. I’ll come by after today’s service for my haircut.” Titus patted Will on his back without taking his eyes off the figure in the distance.
“Okay, Pastor, no doubt.” Will reversed course and headed back toward his hotel room, while Titus walked forward.
The closer he got to the figure, the less obscure it became. He still had a head full of hair, though it was more salt than pepper. Titus was jealous that a man twenty-two years his senior had more hair than he did. When Titus had closed in him and was just twenty feet away, a smile crept over the man’s face. There was nothing for Titus to smile about. Titus stopped three feet from the man, which was close enough for him to have a conversation with him or grab him by the throat.
“Good to see you, son,” Lemont Dawkins said to his only child.
Titus heard “Son,” and he was fifteen again. Lemont’s voice was full of approval, which was what Titus had longed for over the years. The warmth and love for his father that filled Titus lasted a moment.
“You obviously are here for a reason, so . . .” Titus gestured for his father to explain his reason for being at the retreat.
“I don’t know where to start.” Lemont took a step toward Titus.
“Why you’re here would be a good start,” Titus said.
“I missed you, and I wanted to see you. It took me this long to get up the courage to come see you.”
“It only took you thirty years. Well, here I am.” Titus threw up his hands. “Now, if you would excuse me, I have a sermon to deliver.” Titus turned to walk away.
“Wait!” Lemont stretched out his hand and touched Titus on the shoulder. Titus felt anger rise up within him, and he threw his father’s hand off with his shoulder.
“Titus, I wanted to say that I’m proud of you.”
“I know that,” Titus replied.
“And I’m sorry.” Lemont’s voice cracked, and tears started to leak from his eyes.
“I know. I can hear it in your voice and see it in your eyes,” Titus said as he turned around and faced his father. “If you’re here to tell me you’re sorry or that you want me to forgive you, then save it. I know that you’re sorry, and I forgave you a long time ago. I just want to know what you hoped to accomplish by showing up here.”
“I was hoping that you can find it in your heart to let me be your father again. I don’t want to go the rest of my life without a relationship with my son.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me! I’m forty-five years old. What are you going to father me through? My golden years? You weren’t there when I blew my knee out in college. You weren’t there when I graduated college. Where were you when I preached my first sermon? Where were you when I got married? The events that shaped me, you were absent from, so I don’t see why you need to be in my life now.”
“What I’m asking for is a lot, but I just don’t want you to go the rest of your life hating me.”
&
nbsp; Titus looked into his father’s eyes and saw a stranger. Gone was the superhuman pedestal that Titus had once put his father on. Titus saw before him a man that was broken and scared.
“For years I asked myself, why did you hate Mom and me? Titus took a step back and covered his mouth to hide the empathy in his voice. “After all these years of seeing how you leaving affected my mother and me, I realized that I was asking the wrong questions. The real question I should’ve been asking was, why do you hate yourself?”
Titus could tell his father was puzzled by his question.
“You must not love yourself if you could walk away from a family that loves you. I bet you’re not even with the woman who you left us for,” Titus added.
Lemont nodded his head in agreement. Titus figured the shame for his actions prevented him from speaking.
“I bet it’s a lot easier to walk away from a mistress after you’ve walked away from your family. I think you’re here because after all these years of walking away from your calling and everything that matters, you realized that the problem was never us or the calling. It was within you.”
“You don’t understand that there are things within our family that go back farther than you know.”
“You’re talking about the curse. Every day I look in the mirror and I face the demons of my past, and every day, by the grace of God, I put those things under my feet. There ain’t no curse that is more powerful than Jesus. The devil is a liar.”
Titus’s eyes betrayed him, and so did his father’s. Tears streamed down his face, and Titus did not bother to wipe them, because he was a man and he was not afraid of his emotions.
“Listen, Dad, I have to go do what God has called me to do, and I think that what is more important than any other relationship you have is the one you have with God, and God is waiting for you to return to Him. You don’t owe me anything. I survived, and Momma survived. You owe it to yourself to get right.” Titus turned and walked away.
“Titus,” Lemont said to Titus’s back.
Titus did not break his stride. He knew what he did was not right, but it was time for his father to call out to him. And it was time for Titus not to respond to his father’s pleas.
Titus walked back to his room and felt a little disappointed with himself. True, he had stood up to his father and had said the things he needed to say, but he had weakened his stance by being vengeful. Titus could’ve responded to his father’s plea for him to come back. Forgiveness was the name of the game, and Titus had lost that round.
Chapter Twenty-three
Quincy
Last year at the circle of power, Quincy discovered who the man was that had had an affair with his wife, and proceeded to throw a chair and act a fool. This year he wanted to lay low and fly below the radar. He sat alone in a chair in an elongated conference room. It was clear that this room could be used as two rooms, because it had the divider toward the middle. The divider had been pulled back so that the circle would be big enough for the men at the conference. With his arms folded, he thought about how God had laid a difficult path for him to walk. First, through an affair, now through an unexpected pregnancy. Quincy wondered if he would have the courage to voice his concern and seek counsel from his brothers. He had to admit that Dwight was not the hopeless case that he originally thought he was. Dwight, like a lot of young men, needed guidance.
“Hey, Brother Page. Did you get the memo?” Brother Hawkins asked.
“What memo?”
“That whatever chair you sit in, it has to be screwed down.” Brother Hawkins started to laugh, and he put his fist out for Quincy to give him a pound. Of course, Quincy left him hanging.
Quincy did not mind being teased. He had thick skin, and he could give as good as he got, but he refused to let someone who was not a close friend tease him, which was the case with Brother Hawkins.
“Q!”
Quincy turned around to see who had called his name with such urgency. He saw that Jamal, Will, Chauncey, and Dwight were entering the conference room. They seemed concerned, which made Quincy nervous.
“What’s up?”
“Listen, man, don’t trip, but there’s something I have to tell you,” Jamal said as he stopped right in front of Quincy. Quincy was even more concerned now because the other guys seemed to form a half circle, which blocked his view of the door.
“What’s wrong?” Quincy asked.
Before Jamal could respond, Quincy glanced over to his left, at the door. A man entered the conference room, and Quincy felt that urge to throw a chair when he realized it was Minister Jacobs. He looked god-awful.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. What is he doing here?” Quincy said.
“He needs this just as much as we do,” Jamal replied.
Minister Jacobs gave a friendly, but timid wave, to which Quincy did not bother to respond. He had forgiven Minister Jacobs, which was huge for a guy like Quincy, who tended to be a little vindictive. But for Minister Jacobs to show up at the same event where he fell from grace was not only poor timing, but it was also bad form.
“You cool, Q?” Jamal asked.
“Yeah, I’m cool. Trust me, if I wasn’t, you would know.”
The circle of power started, and Quincy did not even pay attention to the testimonies he heard. He looked at Jacobs and wondered why he was there.
“Well, we got time for one more testimony,” Pastor Dawkins said.
Minister Jacobs got up and made his way to the center of the circle. Quincy heard the murmurs and wondered what he was going to say.
“Brothers, I know it’s been a minute, and I debated about coming here, but in the past year God has worked some things out in me.” Minister Jacobs started to choke on his own words, and Quincy started to roll his eyes.“For the last year I’ve been with family in Houston, and I’ve been studying God’s word and trying to figure out where I went wrong. I have come because I wanted to apologize to Quincy Page.”
Men started to turn and look at Quincy. Quincy wondered what Minister Jacobs’s angle was.
“Minister Jacobs, you already apologized and I forgave you, remember?” Quincy said.
“Derrick. My name is Derrick Jacobs, and over the past year I discovered that I was not called to preach.”
Whispers could be heard throughout the room, and Quincy was caught off guard by Jacobs’s words.
“When I apologized to you last year, it was not sincere. It was all about me trying to save face so that one day I could be able to minister again and keep my position. But my desire to be a minister and be of importance in the church was not the result of a calling, but of a need to feel empowered.” Jacobs walked toward Quincy, unafraid of what Quincy’s reaction might be. He knelt down before Quincy as if Quincy were royalty and he was not worthy to stand before him.
“Please, Brother Quincy, forgive me for betraying you and for the pain I caused. I know God has forgiven me, but my mistake will stay with me for the rest of my life.”
A man traveled from Houston to ask for forgiveness for something that he did a year ago. Quincy was in awe of the humility that Minister Jacobs had shown, and realized that he could not harbor any resentment for him. Quincy felt shame over his actions toward Dwight.
“Man, I forgive you.” Quincy stood up, and what he did next was a shock to him. Quincy embraced Minister Jacobs in a hug, and both men shared a tear. Quincy understood at that moment why mercy was so important: because in the end he needed God’s mercy.
Chapter Twenty-four
Titus
“Psalms twenty-two, one . . . ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me!’ Matthew twenty-seven, verse forty-six . . . ‘My God, My God why have you forsaken me?’” Pastor Dawkins stepped away from the podium with his iPad in hand and walked in front of a packed conference room, which had also been the site of the circle of power about an hour ago. His mind was still stuck on seeing his father after thirty years. Titus looked at his message on his iPad and saw a sermon that he had connecte
d with mentally but not spiritually. Deep within his heart and his spirit he knew there was something else he wanted to say. That sermon had remained aloof from Titus until his father entered the conference room and took a seat in the back.
“Forgiveness . . . ,” Titus said to his surprise before he handed his iPad to one of his armor bearers sitting in the front row. “I had a sermon prepared to rally the troops and get you guys stirred up, but I must yield to the Holy Spirit, which is telling me to talk to you tonight about forgiveness.” Titus paused to make sure he had everyone’s attention. “There’s nothing more toxic that can exist within a human being than unforgiveness. There is nothing it profits, and it does not even make the person that you’re mad at suffer.”
Words and ideas came at Titus like a tidal wave, and he paused for a moment to calm the waves and smoothly convey God’s message. “If I was to peer into your lives, I would see points where you were rejected by someone who was supposed to love you. Some of you had teachers, neighbors, and church members who spoke words of unworthiness into your life, and as a result, you built up walls. You allowed all your emotions to erode, with the exception of anger. Anger has grown, and it has spawned bitterness.”
Titus received a sprinkle of “Amens” throughout the room. This was not a sermon that was meant to elicit shouts. This sermon was meant to perform surgery. It was meant to cut through the flab and get to the heart of the matter.
He went on. “You cannot draw strength from anger. You can’t find comfort in unforgiveness, because true power comes from being able to look both the offender and the offense in the eye and not trip.”
The “Amens” grew louder, and a few men even stood up and pointed at Titus. Titus noticed that his father had stood up.
“How you know you’re walking in power is when you don’t react when someone mistreats you. You just keep doing what God called you to do. I have a purpose, and I’m going to fulfill it whether you’re in my life or not. If you’re trying to pull me down, then that means you’re already beneath me, and instead going down to your level, I’m going to pull you up to mine.”