Summer Epiphanies

Fannie Lou Hamer had nothing else to lose. Born the last of twenty children to sharecropper parents, she grew up in dire Mississippi poverty. She began picking cotton on a plantation at age six, and she left school for good at twelve to help her aging parents work the fields. After marrying, she and her husband wanted children, but during surgery for a uterine tumor, a white doctor performed a hysterectomy without her knowledge or consent—a common practice, many said, to suppress Mississippi’s poor Black population. Deciding eventually to register to vote, Mrs. Hamer was challenged instead by her plantation’s owner—a Mister Marlowe—“who told me I would have to go down and withdraw my registration or leave, because they wasn’t ready for that in Mississippi.”*

She left that night, eventually becoming a SNCC field secretary and evolving into an iconic folk hero in the civil rights movement. Enduring beatings in jail and gunfire from nightriders, she never wavered in her goal of helping Mississippi’s poor people—Black and white. She held audiences rapt with her down-home, courageous oratory: “I guess if I'd had any sense, I'd have been a little scared—but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.”

Such clarity in one’s calling comes from hearing God. Thus, as Elijah fled his tormentors, hiding in a cave, the Lord himself spoke to him. “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (NLT). The question is asked of all who seek to serve God. What are you doing here? Is this your ministry? May we listen well as God directs and guides.