For the first time, I found myself feeling sorry for him. Then I quickly realized it wasn’t him I was feeling sorry for. It was me. It was us. Because empathy isn’t putting yourself in another man’s shoes, it’s buying a pair in your own size.

That’s when I realized: When it comes to the final nail in your coffin it doesn’t matter if it’s dull or sharp, it’ll still hold, because a lifetime of prior nails have helped seal that coffin shut.

Sometimes you don’t choose greatness, it chooses you. And when it does, it requires a certain level of understandin', courage and a degree of blind hope.

$1,200, That was the price of a man in those days. Now you can call him black, or you can call him a slave, but he was a man nonetheless.

He broke me down past the flesh, past the muscle, past the bone, down to my soul and in a loud provocation, he asked, “What are you made of?”After I gathered the broken bits and pieces of my life together, I shouted at the top of my lungs, “HOPE! Unbreakable, undeniable, irrevocable hope!

If you stay on this path as long as I have, you’ll soon learn that the road to providence leads right through perdition. And along that road, the devil’s waiting to collect his pound of flesh.

But when they brought Sabira out, the crowd parted almost magically. A sea of hands rose faster than a swell and a bidding war commenced, amongst these civilized gentlemen who made their living off the backs of slaves.

I couldn’t figure out if it was fate or faith that had brought me there. How funny those two words sounded when paired together. One was the inevitable, something I could not change in my life, while the other was the hope and belief that I could. These two words were enemies of each other, and one of them was down right dangerous for a slave to have anywhere near his mind.

That was when I realized we weren’t born to beslaves. It was ignorant for any man to think he could be the master of another. We were all meant to be free, and somewhere there were good people helping to heal this broken world.

How a member of the church—one who had read the Good Lord’s bible—could sit so calmly and watch a man be led to his destruction frightened me.