The planned Martin Luther King Day program fell to shambles with a phone call at 4:00 p.m. yesterday afternoon. The Minneapolis African drummer and the Liberian Choir that was to sing “The Hallelujah Chorus” a capella would not be coming to the 7:00 p.m. MLK Celebration here in Chaska.

When the bad news came, I was apoplectic. “This can’t be. We’ve advertised this.  People are coming to hear the drumming and the singing of this unusual choir. We can’t change this after we’ve done the PR. We’ve sent out electronic and Chaska Herald invitations to the community. We can’t disappoint these people like this.” I wanted to crawl under a rock. I wasn’t of a mind to remember or believe that sometimes…”God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform” (hymn by William Cowper, 1774).

After the momentary paralysis, Momoh Freeman, guest soloist and song-leader Jerry Steele, and Chaska resident Ray Pleasant quickly scrambled to put our heads together to scratch together an emergency game plan. The people who would come would be the choir – we would sing, and sing, and sing. There would be nothing to confuse as entertainment; instead there would be full participation…all the way from beginning to end. “What a concept!” I thought to myself. “That’s how it’s supposed to be. As the President had said in earlier in his Second Inaugural Address, ”It’s about we, the people.”

Jerry, a superb African-American soloist and song-leader, was magnificent. The collective voice of the people singing “Every time I feel the Spirit” filled the Chapel with joy. Strangers turned and welcomed each other easily with signs of warmth and kinship. Sections of the Sermon on the Mount that had inspired Dr. King were read. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemies’. But I say to you, Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who despitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven, for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends the rain on the just and the unjust.”

A hush filled the room except for Jerry’s baritone voice, singing the song to which Martin Luther King, Jr. so often turned in tough times. “Precious Lord, take my hand, Lead me on, help me stand; I am tired, I am weak, I am worn; Through the storm, through the night, Lead me on to the light; Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.”

Chaska resident Ray Pleasant, a retired engineer and former MN State Representative and Bloomington City Councilman, shared the CD of African drumming he had quickly supplied for the ad hoc program.

The room was hushed by the rhythms of the drums, followed by Ray’s explanation of the central importance of drumming to African culture and the reminder that the drumming was once forbidden the African slaves.

Ray set the historical context of what later became known as “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”: Dr. King’s decision to march in Birmingham, refusing to put the need for fund-raising for the fledgling Civil Rights Movement and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference ahead of his conscience. Many of the white northern church pastors and the northern newspapers that had previously supported him rebuked him for his arrest, arguing that now was not the time, arguing that he should be law-abiding and patient. It was in that context of lonely exile in the Birmingham Jail that a young Martin Luther King, Jr. penned with courage “The Letter from the Birmingham Jail” that addressed his critics in ways that changed the world.

A brief portion of that letter fell on the ears of all of us – eyes closed so as to savor the words without distraction – and the once forbidden drums from the quickly fetched CD again filled the Chapel with African drumming and hope.

Three-time Mayor of the City of Chaska Bob Roepke and Carver County Commissioner Randy Maluchnik were invited to share brief excerpts from the speeches of Dr. King. Randy a personal moment of his visit to the MLK museum in Memphis, which is housed in the motel on whose balcony Dr. King was killed by an assassin’s rifle. Randy’s sharing, which had not been planned and could not have been anticipated, is but one example of the what happened in that room, movement of the Spirit of the Living God and the gift of something better than the lost plan that caused a distraught planner’s apoplexy just three hours before.

The voices of the 90 people who had left their couches on a freezing cold night echoed through the Chapel: “God down, Moses, way down to Egypt land. Tell ol’ Pharaoh, ‘Let my people go!'”; “Siyahamba” (“We are marking to the Light of God”),  a movement song that had kept the light of hope burning on the way to the end of apartheid and the democratic election of Nelson Mandela as President of the Republic of South Africa; “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Black national anthem of poet James Weldon Johnson; and “We Shall Overcome”.

The evening ended with prayer for the safety and well-being of the newly inaugurated President, whose election would have been so joyfully celebrated by the man on whose shoulders he stands.

“God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.” Thank you, precious Lord, and thank you Ray, Momoh, Jerry, Bob, Randy, and each and every one who came on a frigid Minnesota night to warm your spirits by the CD drumming of an indoor campfire.