The question every preacher has to ask himself is, "Is this the best I can give?" If the answer is yes, that is all we can do.
—Gardner C. Taylor

As a young man, I recoiled from the idea of being a preacher. I wanted to go to law school and become a criminal lawyer. My boyhood friends in Louisiana tried to discourage me from that idea; at that time no black person had ever been admitted to the Louisiana bar, and my well-meaning friends asked me where I was going to practice law—in the middle of the Mississippi River?

In my senior year of college, I was admitted to the University of Michigan Law School. But before I left, I had a fearful automobile accident; it touched me at the very center of my being, and through that experience I heard the Lord's call to the ministry. I felt both an enormous relief and a great embarrassment—for several years.

So I did not start off with any great confidence or sense of appreciation and awe about being a preacher. I wasn't sure it was a worthwhile thing ...