Day 7 of Kwanzaa - Imani (Faith)

January 1, 2014

CITY CENTER Milwaukee | MPA LLC Signature initiative, All Hands on  Deck, WE CAN, uses hands-on engagement of hidden talent and vetted business at the census tract and neighborhood level engagement to implement its grandiosity and Upscalability 10-year plan (2010-2020). 

Imani (Faith):  To believe with all our hearts in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

MPA LLC calls upon the halls of heritage, the keepsakes of the family-in-struggle, the joy in the morning spiritural and the belief that "he lives" - the little baby boy that so many just finished celebrating birth in a manger.

"I invite you and yours whereever you are, JOIN US in 2014, the 1st year of the implementation of the Affordable Health Care Act (Obama Care), America's first health care law (YAHOO).  Catch the wave of ROLE and RESPONSIBILITY of WE CAN, quickly be about the business of innovative changes to make it what it can and will be for the least of us - that means you and all-of-us; no one is exempt from cancer and other life-altering injuries and diseases", Mary Glass, Chair/CEO, Milwaukee Professionals Association LLC. 

The Kwanzaa Kinara

Today is the seventh and final day of Kwanzaa. Families, friends, and communities come together on this day assess, reassess, celebrate and recommit themselves to practicing the Imani principle.  Faith is the bedrock principle. Faith, as Mary McLeod Bethune said, “is the first factor in a life devoted to service. Without faith, nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible. Faith in God is the greatest power, but great, too, is faith in oneself.”  Faith has been ever present in the black experience in America. At our most unpromising moments, faith has carried us forward, making us more hopeful. The infamous The Dred Scott decision, declaring that all blacks- those enslaved as well as those who were free -were not and could never become citizens of the United States, was a cause for despair. In response to this decision, Frederick Douglass would do his customary thing: He would begin with hope in his speeches, uttering “I walk by faith and not by sight.” And, of course, the second stanza of the Black National Anthem is an ode to faith:

Stony the road we trod,
bitter the chastening rod,
felt in the day that hope unborn had died;
yet with a steady beat,
have not our weary feet,
come to the place on which our fathers sighed?
we have come over a way that with tears has been watered;
we have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
where the white gleam of our star is cast.

On Faith

“Faith is the substance and spirit which makes “tired hearts refreshed and dead hopes stir with the nearness of life; faith is the “promise of tomorrow at the close of everyday, the triumph of life in the defiance of death, and the assurance that love is sturdier than hate, right is more confident than wrong, that good is more permanent than evil.”

- Howard Thurman

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Treat yourself - Introduce yourself to Kwanzaa - 365/7/24.

. Seventh Day of Kwanzaa

On the seventh day the black candle is lit, then the farthest left red, the farthest right green, the next red candle, the next green, the final red and then the final green candle. This represents the 7th principle of Kwanzaa -Imani (ee-MAH-nee): Faith.

On the seventh and final day of Kwanzaa all candles in the Kinara are lit. When the night is done, the family takes one last drink from the Unity cup and the candles are extinguished. Kwanzaa is over till next year

We thank Dr. Maulana Karenga for his gift of KWANZAA and wish him a healthy new year!

MPA LLC Family wishes you Unity in your thoughts of goodwill, Self-Determination in your hours of Purpose and Creativity, and mega successes from your Collective Work in Cooperative Economics tied together by FAITH.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!