"In the day-to-day work of the men and women I met in church each day, in their ability to "make a way out of no way" and maintain hope and dignity in the direst of circumstances, I could see the word manifest.
And perhaps it was out of this intimate knowledge of hardship, the grounding faith in struggle, that the historically black church offered me a second insight: that faith doesn´t mean that you don´t have doubts, or that you relinquish your hold on this world.
In the black community the lines between sinner and saved were more fluid; the sins of those who came to church were not so different from the sins of those who didn´t, and so were as likely to be talked about with humor as with condemnation.
You needed to come to church precisely because you were of this world, not apart from it; rich,poor,sinner,saved, you needed to embrace Christ precisely because you had sins to wash away - because you were human and needed an ally in your difficult journey to make the peaks and valleys smooth and render all those crooket places straight.
It was because of this newfound understandings - that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved - that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized.
It came about as a choice not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on South Side of Chicago, I felt God´s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth."
- From the book "The Audacity of Hope" by Barack Obama
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