What John Lewis Carried Across the Bridge

On March 7, 1965, twenty-five-year-old John Lewis tucked an apple, a toothbrush, and two books into his backpack before walking to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. He did not pack for a picnic. He packed for jail. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis knew what awaited the six hundred marchers he and Hosea Williams were leading toward Montgomery to demand voting rights. He walked anyway.

At the foot of the bridge, Major John Cloud ordered them to disperse. Lewis knelt in prayer. Alabama state troopers charged with billy clubs and tear gas. A trooper's nightstick fractured Lewis's skull. He fell to the pavement, bloodied but conscious, one of seventeen marchers hospitalized that afternoon. Television cameras carried the brutality into living rooms across America.

Lewis would later say he thought he was going to die on that bridge. Yet he rose, and he marched again two weeks later.

Paul writes in Romans 8:17 that we are heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ — "if indeed we share in His sufferings in order that we may also share in His glory." That small word "if" carries the weight of a bridge. Inheritance requires participation. Glory follows those willing to suffer for what is right.