Now, let's just stop right there. I know me. I know my foolish heart. I know my crazy mind. I know my secret attitudes. And I 
know what I did last night with my life! So excuse me if I'm not to amped up and ready to turn around and face God! That is far more nerve wracking than facing my father one time when I was a teenager. (By the way that's him in the picture) There was a time when I was about 17 when I had climbed out of my window, down the trellis, with a backpack that had one of my fathers bottles of liquor, all to go party with my friends (see a boy of course). And you know what happened, come back home, maybe a little drunk and he is sitting on the couch at 3:27 a.m. waiting up and waiting for me to face him.
In that moment my father had an expectation that I would admit my stuff, what I did and who I did it with and invite me to begin to walk more and more into who he had raised me to be, as a single father. It was then when he started calling me Imani. What many of you do not know is that I was born, Kimberly Elizabeth. Yup, doesn't get any more sugary sweet than that! In that moment after my father questioned me and had me sitting up and facing him until almost 5 a.m. he then said, "I want you to walk into the vision that God has for you." Now, that was a buzz kill. Then he said, almost without hesitation, "You will be Imani Nadhari, you will begin to walk into the name of Faith in the Vision." That's what my name means in Swahili. In that moment, my father, gave me an opportunity that night to begin again. My father gave me an opportunity to live and walk differently and offer the world a better me. From that moment, my father took me through a rite of passage with the guiding principles of the Nguzo Saba (which means First Fruits), learning about my history, both within my family and within African American culture and the word of God.
Well, that was a few years ago and I owe so much to my father. Those principles, my history and scripture, is something that I taught my children and I carry all of them with me and they have taught me how to live within and serve in community. Those principles are:
- Unity
- Self Determination
- Collective Work and Responsibility
- Cooperative Economics
- Purpose
- Creativity
- and of course - Faith
The Israelites understood the idea of offering the first fruits of any harvest to God and the Deuteronomy text records one of the first instances of the ceremony of offering God the best of what they had to offer. Through each offering of their first fruits, each time they did that act, they recognized that they where beginning anew. Every harvest was a new beginning and it was a time to get back to the basics of who they are and who they were called to be.
They recited, their common past, their history, their history with the mystery who is God and teaching it to their children. The Israelites, were making the past present and changing their behavior with this understanding. They remembered and told the story of how they came from bondage in Egypt, through the Exodus, to freedom. They knew they owed it all to God, who gave his word and kept it. They moved from slaves in a foreign land to "owning" their own land. They understood essentially the same principles that my father taught me through the Nguzo Saba; unity, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith are essential to practice because it helped them to remember and give thanks to the God who took such good care of them.
Maybe this Lenten season can be a time of holy remembering of who we are, what we have been through and how the faithful God that we serve has journeyed and carried us through it all. Maybe the beginning of Lent can be another version of "first fruits" bringing back to God what originated through him in the first place. Our-selves.
Blessings on your Lenten journey
Rev. Imani N. Dodley
