Increase: The Church Word of the Day

My baby sister called me this morning. She needed someone to believe what she was saying, and she knew she could get that from me. She talked about vision, about our ancestral background, about premonition — the kind of conversation that doesn't survive in most rooms but breathes easy in ours. I sent her two Donald Lawrence songs: "The Prayer of Jabez" and "The Blessing of Abraham." And reminded her, "You know what we believe."

It made me think about how we were raised. Those of us who came up in Black churches — and it didn't matter the denomination — lived through a long stretch when every Sunday was a proclamation of financial gain. Increase. It was preached to the point of nausea. To attract members, other churches advertised that they wouldn't do such a thing, distancing themselves from a theology that had, in some pulpits, hardened into spectacle. And yet. Here we are now, in financial ruin at scales most of us never imagined, and I find myself thanking God for that indoctrination. That's the church word for the day: Increase. Because that mindset prepared me. When the bottom started falling out, it didn't frighten me. It didn't give me pause. It didn't deliver me to despair. It gave me the power of Plan B. It gave me the question: What else is out there for me?

My faith-giving gifts are discernment and vision. I say that plainly because I've learned to abide.

I had a counselor at the Veterans Affairs Hospital, a Black woman, like me, who almost lost me at our first encounter. I told her I was tired, and she dismissed it. "Why are you tired? You're only in your 40s. You speak as though you're 80-something, trying to retire." I was offended, deeply, especially given the room we were sitting in. Those of us who have served in the military, especially those who have seen war, live a life twice over compared to someone who has not. She lost my respect that day. And I've thought about it since, about how often Black women in helping professions have been trained to push other Black women back into the harness rather than ask what the harness has cost.

What strikes me about how other cultures hold rest is how little apology surrounds it. In much of Southern Europe, the afternoon pause is structural (I lived in Germany for over 5 years and witnessed it); businesses close, the country exhales, and no one is shamed for it. In parts of West Africa, eldership is not a stage you earn by surviving but a status the community confers, and tiredness in a woman of my age would be received as wisdom asking for room. In Japan, the practice of ma, the deliberate cultivation of empty space, is treated as a discipline, not a luxury. Here, we treat rest as evidence of failure. We treat slowness as falling behind. And we ask exhausted Black women to keep producing, then send them to therapists who tell them they're too young to be this tired.

When I tell people I intend to move out of the country, and they ask why, I tell them the truth. Because I'm tired. Because I deserve it. Because I don't want to be in a place where someone doesn't want me. I have made bold decisions and bolder moves on the strength of my faith and have not yet regretted a step. If you were raised in the same faith I was, you know there is more. You know you were born for more. So that's what I'm seeking. And this mindset of increase, let me be clear, is not just about financial increase. It is not only "territorial increase," as the song says. It is Increase in peace. Increase in being. Increase in safety. Increase in self. I am going where I can take those things and tend to them for the rest of my life, instead of staying in the rat race where people step on top of one another to get from point A to point B, where rushing becomes a personality, and the small things, the ones that matter most, get missed entirely. Now is the time for me to slow down so that I can increase.

History is full of women who understood this. The Great Migration was, in part, Black women making bold geographic decisions in pursuit of safety and self. The current wave of Black Americans relocating to Ghana, Portugal, Mexico, and beyond is not a fad; it is a continuation. In Brazil, Afro-Brazilian women have long built quilombos (communities of refuge) as a form of collective increase. In the Caribbean, women have moved across islands for generations in search of better, and no one questioned whether they had earned the right. The instinct to leave in order to flourish is not new. It is ancestral. We are simply remembering.

I share all of this because I know so many Black women and women of color who have strived, suffered, sacrificed, succeeded, and are now tired. Our work is not done. It cannot be done, because we still owe this next generation everything we have left so they can do something even more miraculous than what we did. But know this: you don't have to do it at the pace of everyone else. Find your increase in stability. Find your increase in solitude. Find your increase in peace. That may not be where you physically are at the moment. If you have to remove yourself so that you can better share, so that you can better flourish, then do so. Don't worry about what anyone else has to say. Nobody else got you to where you are. It was your tenacity. It was your strength. It was your grit, as Angela Duckworth would say.

Black women, we are increasing.

An African proverb has been sitting with me for a month now:

If you educate a man, you educate an individual. If you educate a woman, you educate a nation.

I carry it like a compass. Because every increase I claim — in peace, in solitude, in safety, in self — is not just mine. It is an inheritance I am preparing to leave.