Born in the Civil Rights era, my parents were advocates for freedom, human rights, and civil rights. They were born in the Jim Crow, segregated South. On paper, the stats didn’t look great for them: poor sharecroppers whose parents died when they were kids. But there is something called the human will, drive, determination and destiny. Somehow, they knew that was not supposed to be the end of their story. So they worked hard, met on both of their first days in New York City, married, and partnered to make a difference. How blessed I was to have been born into this family, and then to have walked with Martin Luther King and the King family, and also to have sat with kings around the globe.

I met Dr. and Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr., when I was in third grade. To my surprise, Mrs. King wrote me a handwritten letter after I sent a thank you note to them in my third-grade cursive. But it would be over a decade later, while I was in college in Massachusetts, that I met their eldest daughter, Yolanda, who became my best friend. As her best friend, I was very close to the family, and Coretta Scott King called me her “other daughter.” As college students, Yolanda and I hiked and backpacked through West Africa, in the very countries I’d later visit as a US diplomat, serving as the first African American, first faith leader and first woman to be the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, serving the first African American President of the United States, President Barack Obama.

Sometimes I sit and reflect on how prophetic our time was overseas, for we taught and preached non-violence, hope and peace, freedom from persecution—the very same message I was tasked as Religious Freedom Ambassador to spread throughout the globe, with kings, parliaments, prime ministers and governments of all types. I reflect on how this sharecropper’s daughter went from using an “outhouse” to working twice in the White House. How awesome is our God!

My aunt gave me the scripture, “To whom much is given, much is required” (Luke 12:48). I didn’t quite know what that meant as a child, but when I became a woman…I no longer saw through a glass darkly, but began to understand that God had a plan, an assignment, a destiny for my life, that would carry me to and through the Civil Rights era, to fight for human and religious rights for everyone, all over the world.

We all have a purpose, to fight for that which is right, with the tools and gifts and opportunities we are given. May this year’s commemoration of the life and walk of Dr. King bring you closer to that walk with God, for in God we live, move and have our very being. And until all of us are free, none of us are free.

In the recent movie, “Harriet,” about the life of Harriet Tubman, there was a scene where she said there are only two choices: freedom or death. During the Civil War, she took all the risks to make sure more than 750 slaves were freed, as she led Union soldiers to raid rice plantations along the Combahee River in South Carolina.

Well, we are in God’s army, and we, too, must fight. God bless you this new year, new decade, with even more determination to walk in and towards your destiny.