For people whose hearts are broken by seeing news of parents, families, and children suffering anywhere, this has been a difficult week. It was an ideal moment to be buoyed by hopeful news like the messages the King Center in Atlanta shared during their celebration of Be Love Day on July 9, as they invited people to pledge to Be Love every day in order to create and strengthen the beloved community Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., envisioned.
As part of the Be Love pledge says: “I pledge to allow love to drive my thoughts, words, decisions, and actions, and honor the humanity of every individual. I pledge to speak the truth to power in love. I pledge to focus on defeating injustice and not destroying the person. I pledge to support leaders who demonstrate a love for humanity. I pledge to promote unity and refuse to perpetuate or magnify division. I pledge to demonstrate a life of courage, care, and compassion as I boldly confront anything that stands in opposition to love.”
This is a needed path. Later this month, faith leaders and child advocates will gather at Children’s Defense Fund’s (CDF) Haley Farm in Tennessee, CDF’s own space for building beloved community, for the 2025 Hall-Proctor Institute for Child Advocacy Ministry. Named for Rev. Dr. Prathia Hall and Rev. Dr. Samuel DeWitt Proctor, this is a place where faith, action, and joy come together to build a better world, and an experience that helps participants continue the necessary, hopeful, sacred work of pursuing justice and joy for all young people. Ten years ago, the beloved late South African Archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Desmond Tutu sent attendees a video message with a timeless exhortation for this work: “Justice needs champions. Good leaders with the ability to identify the challenges and the tenacity to address them. Good leaders driven not by personal ambition, but by an innate desire to improve the circumstances of the human family and the human condition.”
Archbishop Tutu continued: “We inhabit a moral universe. Goodness, righteousness, and fairness matter. We are born to love—all of us, including black, Latino, and white [children] and everyone else. As members of the human family—God’s family—we were created with equal, infinite worth for interdependence. In conditions of harmony, equity, and common purpose, the whole family thrives. God does not use strong-armed tactics to ensure justice is done. God empowers us to do the right thing. It is up to us—you, and you, and you, and me.”
He then shared what he believed was God’s dream for all children: “And God says, I have a dream. I have a dream that all of my children will discover that they belong in one family—my family, the human family—a family in which there are no outsiders; all are held in the embrace of the one whose love will never let us go; the one who says that each one of us is of incredible worth, that each one of us is precious to God because each of us has their name written on the palms of God’s hands. And God says, there are no outsiders— black, white, red, yellow, short, tall, young, old, rich, poor, gay, lesbian, straight— everyone. All belong. And God says, I have only you to help me realize my dream. Help me.”
It is still up to us to use our own hands to help realize this dream. How long will it take? Dr. King himself answered that question in a similar context: “We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience . . . I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because ‘truth crushed to earth will rise again.’ How long? Not long, because ‘no lie can live forever.’ How long? Not long, because ‘you shall reap what you sow’ . . . How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” How long? Not long, even in this current moment, as long as a critical mass among us remains determined to be love and be the partners and champions for justice that immigrant children, children experiencing poverty, children of color, and all children, young people, and members of the human family need.
