I Will Trust in The Lord/Oh, Freedom

This is the second Black History Month we’ve observed within the COVID era (or third, depending on how you count), and I am thankful. With all that Black folk continue to face in this country and around the world amidst the multiple pandemics of COVID and anti-blackness, it is an ongoing miracle that Black folk walk around in any semblance of our right minds. Yet in the midst of such death, God has sustained us. Mary’s Baby has walked with us. And the Spirit consoles and animates us. We seek flourishing nevertheless and it is a glorious testament to annals of God’s faithfulness down through the years.

It in this spirit of awe and resilience that I played these two spirituals, I Will Trust in the Lord and Oh, Freedom. These songs come to me from my known and unknown ancestral bards who sang these as declarations of resistance to the dehumanization they endured in these lands we now call the US. “I will trust in the Lord ‘til I die.” “Before I’d be a slave/I’d be buried in my grave/and go home to The Lord and be free.”

Both songs center death, but not as a morbid end or escape from this world. No, death in these songs is a reminder that the brutalities of this world aren’t everything, and that there is someone greater than the travails constantly besieging us. Death in these songs is a part of the journey to face with a confidence only faith can provide. That’s the kind of confidence that Jesus possessed as he navigated the challenges in this life attacking him from every side: “Don't be afraid of those who want to kill your body; they cannot touch your soul” (Matt 10:28). Indeed, that’s the confidence that I want to live out now through my music and in my life.

What does your relationship to this world reveal about your relationship to death? I pray The Lord grow your faith in light of what is inevitable but what is not final.

You can listen here: I Will Trust in the Lord and Oh, Freedom

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash