Never Out of Place: Grace, Grit, and the God Who Kept Calling

Today I realized I am living the life I once only dreamed of. But to understand that, you need to know where I began.

I grew up in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC)—a tradition rooted in holiness, revival and fire. This both shaped and constrained me. In that world, women were never ordained. Homosexuality was condemned. Pregnancy outside marriage carried shame.

At 19, I became pregnant with my son. No ring. No husband. Just a baby—and the heavy weight of silence.

I left the church—not because I stopped loving God, but because I couldn’t believe God still loved me. When I returned to have my child christened, I was told the father couldn’t stand beside me because we weren’t married. By then, he had already left, telling me to “find the baby a new daddy.”

So I stood there alone. But I was not abandoned. God was still there.

Eventually, I entered missionary training—one of the few leadership paths open to women in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). Still, I felt the call.

I once dreamed of becoming a pastor’s wife. In my tradition, that was one of the main ways I saw women exercising leadership. I thought, “If I can’t preach, then maybe I can at least be near the pulpit. Maybe I can serve from the side.”

But even there, in a space I thought would bring me closer to God’s work, I felt trapped. That’s when I met a woman—and I loved her.

Once again, I lost my church. The tradition that raised me could not hold the fullness of who I was or how I loved.

When that relationship ended, I believed God was correcting me. I buried that part of me and told myself I had to do better. Be better. Be good.

Then I had my daughter. Her father and I were in a violent and unstable relationship. By then, I believed I had become what people whispered about—two children, two fathers, no marriages. A statistic.

But I wasn’t a statistic. I was a story. And the systems around me were built to forget stories like mine. 

Poverty, patriarchy and purity culture conspired to make me invisible. But God did not forget.

We often had nowhere to go. My daughter’s father would trade drugs so that we could have a place to sleep for the night. We weren’t building a future. We were barely surviving the present.

When my daughter was five months old, her father died by suicide. Suddenly, I was a grieving single mother of two, carrying heartbreak, shame and exhaustion.

But grace kept following me.

When my daughter was around nine or ten years old, someone saw something in me—something I couldn’t yet see in myself—and encouraged me to apply to seminary. I applied and was accepted to Episcopal Divinity School, despite not being Episcopalian or having a bachelor’s degree. I packed up our life and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, with my youngest.

I became a seminarian. I cross-registered at Harvard Divinity School and worked at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was more than culture shock; it was a rupture.

I grew up in South Bend, Indiana—a working-class, Black, and resilient community. Suddenly, I was living in Harvard Square, surrounded by affluence and expectation. The hardest part wasn’t the wealth or the whiteness. It was the quiet voice in me that kept whispering, “You don’t belong here.”

I was the only Black woman in my program. A single mom without a bachelor’s degree, now enrolled in a master’s program. People around me quoted theologians like Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer as if it were second nature.

Deep down, I was afraid someone would discover I didn’t belong, that I wasn’t smart or holy enough, that I didn’t come from the right pedigree. I carried that fear like a second skin—not because anyone said I didn’t belong, but because I couldn’t yet believe I did.

And then, one day, I visited Dr. Cornel West during his office hours. I admitted I didn’t have a bachelor’s degree and confessed that I wasn’t sure I belonged at all.

He looked at me and said, “If they let you in without a bachelor’s degree, then it’s because they think you’re a genius.” I laughed—nervously, disbelieving.

“No one thinks I’m a genius,” I told him. Dr. West shook his head and told me a story about Reinhold Niebuhr, who also began his graduate studies without a traditional undergraduate education. Niebuhr spent so much time catching up that he eventually surpassed his peers.

Then Dr. West looked me in the eyes and said, “You’ll catch up, too.”

That moment undid something in me. He didn’t just reassure me. He named me. He placed me in a lineage. He called me forward. 

And somehow, that permitted me to believe that maybe I wasn’t a mistake in that classroom. Maybe I was a miracle.

There were days I had to bring my daughter with me to class—no babysitter, no backup, just us. At ten years old, she would sit beside me in a Harvard lecture hall, crayons or a book in hand, while I tried to keep up with the lecture. 

I would think, “This image—this moment—is going to change her life. She will remember that she belonged in these spaces before she even knew what they were.” That thought alone kept me going.

In my final year of seminary, my classmates voted me “Most Likely to Be the Next Kelly Brown Douglas.” I was stunned. 

Kelly Brown Douglas—the Episcopal priest, the womanist theologian, the scholar whose name once belonged to a world I never thought I’d enter. And now, my name was spoken in the same breath as hers.

I, who once feared being found out, was now being called forward. Not in spite of my journey, but because of it.

And then there was Bishop Barbara Harris—the first Black woman consecrated a bishop in the entire Anglican Communion. We were outside a hotel in New Orleans, attending the Union of Black Episcopalians conference. We had stepped out for a cigarette when a group of passersby stopped and asked if she was my grandmother.

I laughed and told them who she was—the first woman to be appointed a bishop in the Anglican Communion. Without missing a beat, Harris pointed to me and said, “And she is a future priest.”

They looked at me and said, “You’ve got some big shoes to fill, sister.” I didn’t know then how right they were.

Ten years later, I am an ordained Episcopal priest—the first Black woman ordained to the priesthood in my diocese. I was also the first woman ordained and canonically resident to the transitional diaconate in the Anglican Diocese of Cape Coast, Ghana.

What a twist, right? 

I never set out to do any of this. I never imagined this life. I just kept saying yes to the next piece of grace.

And now I am surrounded by love and community that sustains me. I share prayers, ministry, and a vision of church that holds me in ways I once only hoped for.

I’m not standing near the pulpit anymore. I’m in it—preaching from it, blessing from it, living into a call that once felt so far away.

And yet, I still have to remind myself that I belong. People often tell me I don’t give myself enough credit, that I don’t see what they see. And they’re probably right.

It has taken me years even to begin to see myself the way others have all along. There are still days I question whether I’m doing enough, being enough, becoming enough. But I’m learning.

I’m learning to believe I wasn’t a mistake in that classroom. That I wasn’t out of place in that pulpit. That I’m not unworthy of this love or this life.

I have everything I dreamed of. Not because I believed in myself the whole way through, but because God kept believing in me when I couldn’t. Even when I was ashamed. Even when I was afraid. Even when I didn’t yet see the miracle I was becoming.

Today, I can say it plainly: I am queer, and I am ordained. I have everything I once dreamed of.

In the words of Assata Shakur, “Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.” My life, my ministry, my survival—they are that synthesis.

Now I know I was never out of place. I was always being prepared.

And though I don’t always feel it, I am living proof of grace. And my children—and their children—carry that proof forward as their inheritance.