Welcome to the weekly Five Minute Friday blog link-up!

We gather every week to write for five minutes flat on a single word prompt . . . so get your timer and your typing fingers ready! We’d love to have you join us!

If you’re new and you’re not sure how the link-up works, learn all about it here.

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This week we’re in for a special treat — my friend Patrice Gopo is with us, sharing a guest free write!

Patrice’s essay collection, All the Colors We Will See: Refections on Barriers, Brokenness, and Finding Our Way is now available for pre-order on Amazon, and you’re not going to want to miss it.

Go get your copy (and five or six more for your friends) here.

Disclosure: Affiliate links have been used in this post, which means I will get a (very) small commission at no extra cost to you if you choose to make a purchase after clicking through the link to Amazon.

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This week’s FMF prompt is: WAY

[Tweet “It’s @5minutefriday time! Come write with us! The prompt? WAY. Ready? GO.”]

Soak up these powerful words from Patrice: 

“The way, the truth, and the life.”

You say these words seated in a Sunday school classroom surrounded by children’s songs and flannel boards. You sit with your pale pink tights and your pastel dress, and you repeat words even as you don’t fully know what you say. But you say with everyone else, “The way, the truth, and the life.”

And there will come a day, many days, many years in the future when you will learn how people used this faith to place your ancestors in bondage, wrists ripped raw with shackles and lies.

You will hold these realities of history and weep tears enough for a river—and then weep more.

There will come a day when you will wonder if you belong here after you see image after image of white Jesus and his blue eyes, his blonde hair.

You will weep not just for history but for the present too, for a present marred by the blood of the past, for a world where we don’t treat everyone as created in the image of God.

And in those days so far in the future, you will wonder if you were naïve, if you were wrong to take this faith and believe. Or perhaps others, perhaps others were just plain wrong.

But now you are small with braids plaited on the sides of your head and a dress of soft fabric and lips that hold words, “The way. The truth. The life.” You say these words. You speak these words. Again and again and again. Enough so you remember across your life.

STOP.

Wow, right? 

I’m gonna give you a moment to sit with that . . . then encourage you to share this post on social media so others can read it, too.

And since I’m sure you’re now even more persuaded that you want to hear more from Patrice, don’t forget to order her book here!

[Tweet “Don’t miss this powerful @5minutefriday post from @patricegopo!”]

Patrice Gopo is a 2017-2018 North Carolina Arts Council Literature Fellow. She is the author of All the Colors We Will See: Reflections on Barriers, Brokenness, and Finding Our Way (August 2018), an essay collection about race, immigration, and belonging. She lives with her family in North Carolina.

Website: www.patricegopo.com
Facebook: @patricegopowrites
Twitter: @patricegopo
Instagram: @patricegopo

Join the challenge by sharing your own five minute free write on the prompt, WAY, below:

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