Years That Answer

My Morning with Michelle Obama

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

— Zora Neale Hurston

I have so many questions. I always have questions, but right now, I have QUESTIONS. Where, exactly, are we? (All of us, not just people like me, but all of we, as a community, nation, world. The We the People.) How did we get here? And where do we go from here? These are just a few questions that wake me up at night.

I am not alone in my questions. There is comfort in questioning with others — a community that questions what is and what if and looks for answers together. Community stands in direct opposition to isolation, fear, hate, and cruelty. Community, by its very nature, is about building, imagining, and creating. (All that feels more like an answer — a visceral, real, and meaningful response — to me.) We draw strength from community.

On MLK Day in 2009, as part of celebrating Barrack Obama’s Inauguration, I participated in a National Day of Service. I want to think about that day today. I had moved from DC to Indiana to volunteer on Barrack Obama’s 2008 campaign and had been invited to assemble care packages for service people at, then, RFK Stadium as part of the Inaugural Celebration. We assembled care packages at long tables that reminded me of the tables used in my Fellowship Hall during dinners at my childhood church. Hundreds of tables. Hundreds of volunteers. A morning of service. At one point, Michelle, Malia, and Sasha Obama arrived and began assembling care packages with us. They stayed a long time. The girls were young, and it was beautiful to see them right there alongside their mother. I was not close enough to interact with them, but I was close enough to be profoundly moved and inspired. I will never forget their presence and their example.

Let me talk about the idea of answering a call. Michelle Obama answered a call — as she has before and after that day — to serve our community and country. In that sense, we are all called to live our project and do what is ours to do in this world. Answering means paying attention. Answering means we are starlight and steel. Answering means doing the work. May this be a year of answers like those I found MLK Day in 2009. May this be a year of love and answers. May this be a year we all show up. May this be a year where the moral arc of history bends towards justice.