Bruised Knees and Unbroken Faith

On March 7, 1965, Amelia Boynton Robinson walked toward the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, alongside six hundred marchers demanding their right to vote. She was fifty-three years old. State troopers charged with tear gas and billy clubs. Boynton Robinson was beaten unconscious on that bridge. The photograph of her crumpled body was published in newspapers around the world.

But two weeks later, on March 21, Amelia Boynton Robinson was back. She joined three thousand marchers stepping off from Brown Chapel AME Church, beginning the fifty-four-mile journey to Montgomery. Five days of walking, sleeping in muddy fields, singing freedom songs into the Alabama night. Her body still carried the bruises from Bloody Sunday. Her spirit carried something stronger.

She had been registering Black voters in Dallas County since the 1930s — decades before the nation paid attention. Doors slammed. Applications denied. Threats delivered to her doorstep. And still she marched.

The writer of Hebrews tells us to run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith. That race is not a sprint, beloved. It is a long march — and sometimes the bridge knocks you down. But we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses who got back up, who kept their eyes on the prize that no billy club could take away.