There can be no healing without truth.

When people were hungry, Jesus didn't say, "Now is that political or social?" He said, "I feed you." Because the good news to a hungry person is bread.

When we look squarely at injustice and get involved, we actually feel less pain, not more, because we overcome the gnawing guilt and despair that festers under our numbness. We clean the wound - our own and others' - and it can finally heal.

When a fire starts in one it just races through. And that is in a way unconscionable.

What is black empowerment when it seems to benefit not the vast majority but an elite that tends to be recycled?

When I talk of forgiveness I mean the belief that you can come out the other side ... a better person than the one being consumed by anger and hatred. Remaining in that state locks you in a state of victimhood, making you almost dependent on the perpetrator. If you can find it in yourself to forgive then you are no longer chained to the perpetrator. You can move on.

In the Bible, we first encounter God when he sides with a bunch of slaves against a powerful Pharaoh, an act of grace freely given.