Facebook Publication Date: 2/3/2022 21:02

In this, this introduction to the Hope and Vision series 2022, I feel it’s important to overtly name why there was no Hope and Vision 2021.

There should have been. All of the essays from Staff and Leadership Team have been in the can for months, waiting for my intro and my wrap up, and for supporting videos from me.

Well– brutal real talk: For pretty much all of 2021, my focus, both as Lace on Race, and viscerally personally, was all about survival. It was hard to hold on to hope, for reasons I have spoken of multiple times before. And I have come to realize that without hope, there can be no vision.

We are going to talk about prophetic voice later on this year (not least because I found my own again) but for now I just want to say this: prophecy is not (or not always or often) what people think it is; usually there is no soothsaying or fortune telling. Rather, prophecy can also be thought of, if you will allow me, it can also be thought of as ‘high aim steering’–being able to see beyond the road right in front of you, and see beyond *what is* to *what could and or should be*.

Using fictive imagination, and savvy curiosity, and a certain flavor of realistic optimism, one can extrapolate and refocus past the yellow lines on the road to catch–sometimes glimpses, sometimes through murky glass, to be sure, but to catch a vision–reality based, not at all delusional–of the world they want to see.

Here at Lace on Race, we strive to take it more than a bit further.

Most of us can envision–crucially, from a distance–but most of us can indeed envision a better world. But most of us lack, or do not acknowledge that we possess (not the same thing), the capacity, agency, and volition to make the world embedded in our mind’s eye closer to concrete reality.

Welp.

In this series, the Staff, Leadership Team, and Board Members of Lace on Race did this exercise and blew my mind. They truly took my breath away with their audacity, their moxie, their commitment, and their faithfulness.

Even so, even with these amazing women, it took me almost a full year to fully allow their faith and assurance–faith in me, and assurance of a meaningful future–to fully seep into my marrow. Last year was that hard.

But their words encouraged me to write my own Hope and Vision 2022–something I had neither the heart nor the stomach for after the crushing events of the last year.

Together they filled my cracked empty cup.

Together, they mended my cup so water would hold.

So I could then pour out to you, with no drips, no leaks, no wasted miracle of water.

I will be forever grateful.

Read along with me, and be awed, convicted, lifted, and encouraged.

And then be galvanized to commitment–or, yes, to re-commitment.

To the world you want to see.

To the person you want to be.

Acknowledge, pivot, leverage, and flex.

All in service to North Star.

Let us all Keep Walking.

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