Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church. Third Ward. 10:00 AM.

The pastor let the congregation sit in silence as he paced across the sanctuary, waiting for the room, always knowing the seriousness of that one moment.

“I want to start with something some of you might remember. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. This was the slogan from The United Negro College Fund. We’ve now seen generations of our young people raised under this banner. Thousands of young men and women had walked into historically black universities. Most of them were the first in their family to receive a 4-year college or university degree. Many of them came from poor families.”

Niya had listened to the pastor give a version of this sermon before, but today it hit harder than other times, and she felt something calling her, that this message was meant for her alone.

“We have all known people, met people, grown up beside people, who have been given tremendous gifts and wasted them. People with brilliant minds, gifted hands, athletes with tremendous talent that seemed limitless. We’ve seen these same people not use those gifts, use them poorly, or walk away from those gifts entirely.”

Marcus reached out to hold Niya’s hand, but she pulled back. Her attention shifted from the pastor to the Arbiter’s website that she had been reading every night over the past week. She thought of those profiles of the women who had gone through arbitration and wrote about their experiences and feelings after going through the process.

“My brothers and my sisters, what’s true for the mind is also true in the spiritual realm. You see, when you get to the place that your mind is not in tune with the word of God, where you are not determined to follow the will and the ways of God, then I want to suggest to you that you are spiritually wasting your mind.”

Niya shifted in the pew and exhaled.

“When you get to the place that you claim to be a child of God, but you act like an unbeliever, so much so that people cannot recognize you simply by watching you, observing you, or following you. I want to suggest to you that you are spiritually wasting your mind when you allow the ideologies of this world to pull you away from the path that God wants you on. When you make up in your mind that you know better than God and so you are going to do what you want to do regardless of what God says you are spiritually wasting your mind.”

Niya remembered reading that profile of a woman, Abigail Foster. The woman was different—single mom, white, living somewhere in the northeast. But it was what she said that had gripped her mind: “I’d built a life that looked right from every external angle, but I was slowing running on empty on the inside. My life was misaligned.” Sitting in the pew next to Marcus, those words cut through and changed her.