Mom Heart

He wasn’t anything fantastic in the beginning. Born into slavery, to a father he never knew and a mother who was taken from him at an early age, his future didn’t hold a lot of promise. He was sickly, given to bouts of coughing and dreadful colds, and as a result, he didn’t have the ability to perform the energy-consuming work of chopping wood and plowing fields. Yet, God had a plan and a purpose.

When his mother was kidnapped by bushwhackers, his masters became his care-givers, and because he wasn’t ‘built’ for hard labor, George’s responsibilities consisted of those that put him in direct contact with God’s beautiful creation: picking and gathering fruit, collecting eggs, and sowing seed, just to name a few. His younger years were full of the wonder and the joy of discovering God’s amazing world. As he grew he developed a hunger to know more. He collected rocks, kept pet frogs, and planted and tended his own garden. To add to this he began an interest in painting the natural world that he had learned to hold so dear. No money for paints or canvas, he consistently turned to God’s creation for the answer. He used boiled bark or the juice of berries for his paints. As for canvas, any stone or piece of wood proved to work perfectly. George trusted that each and every thing in the world had a purpose behind it, many uses and benefits, and those purposes were given it by the Author of all things.

It was after many hardships and obstacles, after trusting God through every seeming roadblock and sharp turn in his path, that God’s plan revealed itself in the form of a letter from Booker T. Washington. In that letter Mr. Washington asked George to come to Alabama. The people there were poor. The soil even poorer, having been depleted of virtually all nutrients due to year after year of growing the same crop: cotton. When he arrived at Tuskegee Institute and saw how the students studied in shacks and how the campus itself sat in the middle of swampland, he saw that God’s plan had led him there to that very spot. And his purpose was clear: do what he could to teach these people to live a better life. [Read More...]