The institution of Evangelical Christianity serves many purposes: For some, it is a convenient farce, an expedient through which power, fame, and authority are acquired; for others, it is a source of moral guidance, a doctrinal foundation upon which ethics, ideology, and way of life are grounded; and for still others—for those whose faith constitute purpose itself—it is the very “bread of life.”

I was seven years old when I returned to Nigeria for the first time after my family’s immigration to the United States. How do you describe returning to a place that you had always called home, but had never intimately known?

I am described as effortlessly astute, contagiously joyful, and cautiously spontaneous. I’m also boundlessly ambitious.

Having restlessly toiled behind the counter of my dad’s dusty auto parts store for many years, I should have foreseen a day that I would look on my home with an outsider’s eyes.

I belong to both the richest and the poorest nations of the Western Hemisphere, the United States, my mother’s country of origin, and Haiti, my father’s homeland.

The night everything changed is permanently stitched into the fabric of my memory. I was sitting with her at the Lincoln Memorial, gazing into her beautiful brown eyes, while the shadow of the Washington Monument bounced off the Reflecting Pool in my periphery.

One night seven years ago, my mother and I sat in the car waiting for the light to change when a homeless man knocked on our window.