He was retired military: safe...
Illustration
He was retired military: safe and secure after more than twenty years in the service, living
on a comfortable pension. He had achieved a standard of living higher than his parents'
wildest dreams. By all accounts, he should have been supremely happy; but he was not.
Something very important was missing from his life.
Alex Haley longed to know where he came from, so he set out to discover his "roots." Everyone he told about his quest said he was crazy. How could an African American, a descendant of slaves, trace his family history back across the ocean? There were no written records, they objected; no one kept track of the names of slaves.
But Alex Haley had listened well to the stories of his family, the lore that had been passed from generation to generation. He had heard tell of a man named Kunta Kinte -- captured by slavers, torn away from his homeland in West Africa. Impelled by the power of that name, generations old -- and by the conviction that there had been a living, breathing human being behind it -- Haley managed to do what everyone thought impossible: He traced his roots back, generation by generation, all the way to Africa. The book he wrote -- Roots -- tells his family's story.
Today's lesson from the book of Jeremiah traces a different kind of roots: not the roots of family history, but rather, spiritual roots.
Alex Haley longed to know where he came from, so he set out to discover his "roots." Everyone he told about his quest said he was crazy. How could an African American, a descendant of slaves, trace his family history back across the ocean? There were no written records, they objected; no one kept track of the names of slaves.
But Alex Haley had listened well to the stories of his family, the lore that had been passed from generation to generation. He had heard tell of a man named Kunta Kinte -- captured by slavers, torn away from his homeland in West Africa. Impelled by the power of that name, generations old -- and by the conviction that there had been a living, breathing human being behind it -- Haley managed to do what everyone thought impossible: He traced his roots back, generation by generation, all the way to Africa. The book he wrote -- Roots -- tells his family's story.
Today's lesson from the book of Jeremiah traces a different kind of roots: not the roots of family history, but rather, spiritual roots.
