Words Written in the Margins

On April 12, 1963 — Good Friday — Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, for leading nonviolent protests against segregation. Placed in solitary confinement, he was denied phone calls and cut off from the movement he had poured his life into. When a copy of the Birmingham News reached his cell, containing a statement from eight white clergymen urging him to abandon his campaign, King had no proper paper on which to respond. So he began writing in the margins of that very newspaper.

Word by word, in tiny script squeezed between columns of newsprint, King composed what would become one of the most important documents of the twentieth century. His attorneys later smuggled in a legal pad, and over several days he filled page after page — nearly seven thousand words of moral reasoning that would be reprinted millions of times and studied in universities around the world.

But none of that was visible in that dark cell. King could not see the harvest. He could only see newspaper margins and the walls of a jail.

Galatians 6:9 tells us, "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up." Sometimes faithfulness looks like writing in the margins — doing the next right thing in a cramped and discouraging place, trusting that God will multiply what we cannot yet see. The harvest is coming. Do not give up.