For our purposes, then, what he is saying could well be reinterpreted or paraphrased to say you can't count blessings and be cantankerous at one and the same time. You can't smile and fuss with the same face. It's a very important thing to know. What Paul is saying—rejoice; don't worry; take no thought of things; pray always without ceasing; and think on these things—all of this is designed to remind us that you simply must keep your mind on these positive things if that's the kind of a life you want to live.

Many years ago I was pastor of a church and we had a member whom I shall always remember as my most outspoken opponent. She was an intelligent lady and she was strongly committed to community betterment and civil rights. So one day I was directing a demonstration in downtown Fresno, and the temperature was only about 106. This outspoken enemy drove up beside me, flung the door open and said in a very mean voice, "Get in this car before you kill your fool self running up and down in this heat!"

Well I got in the car and sat there meekly and quietly, knowing not what one would say to a person like her, engaged in this particular activity. I happened to look out of the corner of my eye, and I saw one of the most interesting things: she loved the fact that this demonstration was going forward, and she was quite pleased with it and she was trying to frown, to agree with what she had said to me, but she was too happy with it, and she broke out and smiled. In fact, she finally laughed and I laughed with her, because we knew her problem: You cannot be angry and happy at the same time.

This is not a mind game. People may say it's not a matter of "as you think so it'll be"—"wishing will make it so." It's a fact that we need to face the negative things in our lives, but after we face them, we need to move on. We need to move on to place emphasis on things that are positive. I think for instance of my enslaved ancestors who praised God more, as it were, from the bottom of the barrel, than most of the people on top. But every now and then you find in their spirituals the fact that they really faced the realities of their difficulty. They sang songs like "Nobody knows the Trouble I've seen, nobody knows my sorrow, nobody knows the trouble I see." But then after a while they say, "Nobody knows but Jesus. Glory hallelujah!" Or they would sing a spiritual like "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home." But before that spiritual is finished they have broken out in a positive statement: A true believer a long way from home.

Maybe you never noticed it's the same thing with the Psalms. Probably the most sorrowful song of all is the one that Jesus quoted on the cross when he said, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" But those of you who know the Psalms know that this is the 22nd Psalm, and whether he was singing it or just repeating it, you go on 22 verses and you find that Psalm saying, "I will praise thee in the midst of the great congregation." In both cases, in the spirituals and in the Psalms, one has fought or sung or prayed one's way through the negativities and wound up at a place of praise. And that's how you have no bad days.

I must insist that it's true that if you follow these words of Paul you will have no bad days. It works for everybody, including cancer patients. Martin Luther King's father, Martin Luther King, Sr., oft told about his mother who used to tell him down in Stockbridge, Georgia, "Always thank God for what's left." And there is always something left. If you have enough breath to complain, you have enough breath to praise God. If you think about the fact that you're still alive, the fact that you can still think, the fact that you still have use of your limbs, as the old folks used to say, you have something to praise God about. And that makes all the difference in the world. If you paper the walls of your world with praise, you have a good day.

My dear wife of 52 years was at one time the Dean of the Chapel at Spellman College. Bill Cosby came down there one Palm Sunday and filmed one of his shows. I guess in recognition of the fact that they were using her chapel all day, they focused the camera on her a couple of times. Well now, if you come to our house today and spend more than an hour, you're very likely to be asked if you saw her on national TV. And if you didn't, she will gladly pull out the videotape and show you where she was on "The Cosby Show." Now mind you, we have tapes of all sorts of things. We could do reruns of flat tires, reruns of hornet stings, reruns of what it looked like after the flood, reruns of all sorts of unpleasant things, but those are not the ones you rerun. You pick the reruns, and you praise God all the while. You experience them all over again, and this is how one thinks on these things.

The man who wrote the article had a very interesting way of putting it. He said, "I may have hot days and cold days. I have dry mouth days and swollen tongue days. I have lonely days and wish I could be lonely days. I have hair falling out days and chapped lip days. I have tired days and aching days. I have diarrhea days and regurgitation days, but I don't have any bad days."

I have had an interesting 77 years on this planet, and it includes arthritis, a couple of major heart attacks, several serious encounters with cancer involving surgery and radiation. I don't have the use of one of these eyes—somehow it diappeared. But with all that, I have no bad days. For, if one follows Paul's word, there aren't any bad days. Finally, sisters and brothers, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, if there be any virtue, if there be anything to praise God about, think on these things.

Amen.

Henry Mitchell: Well, that's fifty-five, fifty-six years ago and at the time I had no dream of ever even being sick. It didn't last very long because I had a very serious illness my first semester, but I never dreamed of getting involved in anything like this. It's the way life unfolds.

Talbot: Now, your wife, Ella, whom you mentioned, Dr. Ella Mitchell, is a very crucial part of the healing process, I suspect, in the last couple of years with your struggle.

Mitchell: Well, I think there's a sense in which life with her has been such a joy and so peaceful that I haven't had to waste any of my physical resources on stress. That, for so many people, becomes such a problem. Without that stress and with, very clearly, the blessing of God, the miraculous blessing of God, actually, I'm still around.

Talbot: Now, you both, you and your wife, are team ministers and mentors, and you say you're retired, but I suspect you just now are making time to do all the things that you want to be doing here and around the world at seminaries. You've just returned from Moscow, I understand.

Mitchell: Well, that was in June, but we do a great deal of teaching and lecturing in seminaries everywhere. We've taught in England and at the College of Preachers in Washington, D.C. We will be at the Presbyterian Seminary in San Anselmo, California, this spring, and so it goes.

Talbot: Dr. Mitchell, you talk about the language of the soul, and one of the many degrees you hold is in linguistics. Thirty years ago you wrote the book, Black Preaching, in which you have a chapter on Ebonics, a controversial issue today.

Mitchell: The chapter is entitled "Black English," yes.

Talbot: Say more about that.

Mitchell: Well, the chapter on Black English talks about the fact that when a preacher speaks to people he or she needs to speak and deal in their culture. It all came about when I was working on the linguistics degree, and I listened to the best of black preaching for hundreds of hours. Little by little I evolved a speech nearer to their speech in very subtle ways. I had grown up in a mid-Ohio, mid-United States, I should say Midwest lower middle class family speaking supposedly standard English. Really it's just media English, or the media of the people in power.

Talbot: Both your grandfathers were preachers.

Mitchell: Both of my grandfathers were preachers, but I swore I wouldn't be a preacher originally. But as I listened to all of these people I began to sound more like them in very subtle ways, so that the members in my church where I was pastor at the time said to me, "Reverend, when you went to get another degree, I said, ‘Oh, Lord, we won't understan' him at all, now.’" And to my absolute amazement and theirs, too, they said, "But now, you're lettin' the Lord use you." Now if you were listening carefully, you'll notice that I started speaking in a radically different way from what I have been speaking. And what really happened was that I was speaking to them in the language of their soul, and while you don't notice the difference, the subtleties are vitally important and spiritually significant.

Talbot: Which is also the language of worship, as you point out.

Mitchell: Right. You worship in your original language.

Talbot: We just have a moment left, but you have to tell us about the turning point in your life, when Paul Tillich the great theologian at Union really turned you around.

Mitchell: Well, Tillich gave us an assignment to go and look at all the symbols in our churches and come back and say what they were and what they meant. Well, this is 1942, and I said after class, "Dr. Tillich, you see, I belong to the black church and we don't have any symbols. We're very simple, you know." And he looked at me, and well, he gave me a thrashing with his tongue. He said, "Everybody has symbols. You go and see them." And thank God I did. I have been involved in the culture of my people ever since.

Talbot: Of course, you are the preeminent expert on symbolism in the black church today. Dr. Mitchell, a final word as we go: What's next for you in this next year?

Mitchell: We are writing a joint autobiography, and we're hoping that will come out. My wife just had a third volume of Lowe's Preaching Women to come out. I might say, also, that thie chapter on black preaching is still in print in a book called Black Preaching which is still available at Abingdon Press.