August 29, 2026

Only For A Moment

For a moment, it seemed as if the Kingdom of God had appeared. But it was only for a moment.

Coretta Scott King wrote this remembering the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, as she stood near the Lincoln Memorial listening to her husband deliver the "I Have a Dream" speech to a quarter of a million people. She felt something break through the ordinary tension of that summer, a shared feeling of hope and unity sweeping across the crowd like nothing she had witnessed before. She knew even as she felt it that the feeling would not hold, that the boycotts and beatings and long nights of organizing still waited for them the next day. She set the sentence down anyway, so she would remember that grace like that had come, however briefly, and that noticing it mattered.