The Only One Standing

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” — Galatians 3:28 (ESV)

One Sunday morning, after years of hunger for a deeper experience of God, Amanda felt strongly that she should go to Green Street Church in New York to hear a preacher named John Inskip. The whole walk there, doubts and fears crowded her — worries about her baby at home, fear of what her husband would say, one excuse after another to turn aside to a closer church. She kept walking.

She arrived worn out and sat a few seats from the door. And she was, as far as she could see, the only Black person in the building. That mattered to her, and she was honest about why. She wrote that she had always carried a kind of fear of white people — not that they would hurt her, exactly, but a deep unease, a sense that they were “there” and important and she was “here” and not. She had learned, growing up in service, to hold herself carefully, to know her place, to never make a scene where white people might see.

So as the sermon opened her up and God met her in a way she had been seeking for twelve years, a war started inside her. Wave after wave of joy rose in her and she wanted to shout for gladness — and every single time, a voice said: if you make a noise here, in front of all these white people, they will put you out. She sat on her hands. She held it in. Twice she felt the joy come and twice she smothered it out of fear. It nearly cost her the whole thing; she sank for a few minutes into real despair.

Then, standing there trembling, she heard words come to her, clear, from the corner of the church: there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. She said she had never really understood that verse before, but God made it plain to her in that moment. And when the closing hymn reached the line about the blood that cleanses from all sin, she stood up on shaking legs and shouted “Glory to Jesus” — out loud, in that room, the only Black woman in it. The preacher answered, “Amen, Glory to God.” Walking home afterward she said the white people she had always been afraid of “looked so small. The great mountain had become a molehill.”

Read that carefully, because it is not a small thing. A society had spent Amanda’s whole life teaching her that she was less — that she should shrink, stay quiet, stay in the back, never draw attention in a white room. And what finally broke that fear was not a slogan about self-esteem. It was one line of Scripture landing with power: in Christ, the categories the world ranks you by — your race, your class, your gender — do not decide your worth. She was not a lesser person who should keep silent. She was one, fully and equally, with everyone in that room, before God.

You have absorbed messages about where you rank, too — from your school, your feed, the room you feel you have to shrink in. Some of you have been made to feel small for exactly the things Amanda was: your color, your money, your family, your body. Amanda’s morning at Green Street says the mountain that makes you feel small is often smaller than it looks, and that the truest thing about you is not your rank in anyone’s eyes but your standing before God, who counts you as one, not less.

One thing to do: name the room or situation where you make yourself small — where you go quiet, hide, and shrink because you feel like you do not rank. Next time you are in it, do one honest, ordinary thing you would normally suppress: speak up, take the seat, ask the question. Stand up, the way Amanda finally did.