Wisdom Seeds Read Online Free PDF

car.”
    â€œThank you,” my dad stated flatly.
    Mom added, “This is what your father always wanted.”
    â€œSeek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you,” I said hoping to impress him.
    My dad looked back at me as he turned the corner. “Matthew 6:33.” He never smiled.
    We rode the rest of the six blocks in silence. Three weeks, I thought to myself, twenty-one days and counting.
    Sitting in the second seat of the second row, I stared at my dad during the church service as I listened to each hallelujah and amen that could have been scripted into his weekly sermon. I wondered if Reverend Allen would ever really get to know me and love me for who I was. He was good at making everyone at home miserable and I was convinced he as miserable, too. My dad proclaimed himself to be a scholarly preacher and intended to redeem the preacher family line from the shame my grandfather had cast upon it. However, neither of my brothers had followed the path my dad had chosen for them and both were estranged from the family.
    In one of my psychology classes I studied people with my dad’s profile. He would never accept the fact that his external, narcissistic behavior was in complete conflict to his role as a pastor. It was almost as if my dad was schizophrenic. He was a completely different person at the church. I realized at a very early age that I wanted Reverend Allen as my dad.
    My mind continued to wander and I was unable to stay focused during the sermon. As usual, the theme forMay was family. In my attempt to understand the man that my mom had been married to for most of her adult life, I realized that much of what I knew about him was through the eyes of others. His congregation loved him. They saw him as an outstanding member of the African American community. He remained married to my mom, his only sweetheart. They raised three children who were parented by both of them in an era where blended families were becoming common place and even acceptable in the pulpit.
    Reverend Allen held the heartstrings of the community as a loving father with two prodigal sons. He spearheaded the Big Brother program and hosted their annual picnic in our backyard. Over the past ten years he had ordained twelve young men from his Big Brother program. There could have been one hundred of them, but my dad would never feel completely redeemed because he had two sons who had spent years distancing themselves from the family and the church.
    Mom summed him up by saying he was a very good man who was disappointed about a lot of things in life. “He loves us,” Mom told me several times, as if she needed to convince me – and maybe herself. Even though he was from a line of preachers, my dad always felt his father dropped the ball and didn’t get it right – so that became his job.
    It’s ironic that my dad always talked about how important it was to love God. With my dad’s love as my only example, loving a God I couldn’t see was difficult. My dad never gave me all that I desired from him. I wanted to be his little girl, I needed to be his princess, and I longed to feel his unconditional love. The love my dad talked so much about was only evident from the pulpit. If my dad had been a bus driver, we would have spent the summers touring the country – pipe dreams.

    My life changed forever on a sticky, hot Saturday in June of 1980. I arrived at the Trailways bus station in downtown Pittsburgh at 6:45 p.m. My cousins were wearing Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority tee shirts, like we planned. Andrea wore white jeans with white canvas sneakers that looked new. Her hair was flawlessly curled in spite of the heat. Alicia’s hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She looked more like a high school student with her cut-off jeans and green flip-flops. Andrea seemed taller and Alicia seemed thinner.
    â€œDanielle Allen,” Alicia said hugging