The One-Eyed Preacher Who Saw What Others Couldn't

In April 1906, a one-eyed son of former slaves named William Seymour stood in a converted stable on Azusa Street in Los Angeles and began to preach. He had no seminary degree. He had no denominational backing. He had been barred from sitting with white students at Charles Parham's Bible school in Houston and forced to listen through a cracked door. Yet when the Spirit fell at 312 Azusa Street, something happened that stunned the watching world.

Black sharecroppers knelt beside white bankers. Mexican laborers prayed alongside Swedish immigrants. Women stood and prophesied. A twelve-year-old boy spoke words that left grown men weeping. An elderly washerwoman named Jenny Moore, who had never played piano, sat down at the keys and began playing hymns in languages she had never learned.

The Los Angeles Times called it a "weird babble." But Frank Bartleman, a journalist who witnessed it firsthand, wrote something more perceptive: "The color line was washed away in the blood."

This is precisely what the prophet Joel proclaimed centuries earlier — that the Almighty would pour out His Spirit not on the credentialed few, but on all flesh. Sons and daughters. Old and young. Servants and free. The God who spoke through Joel refuses to limit His Spirit to the powerful, the educated, or the expected. He pours it out on anyone willing to receive it — even a man who had to listen through a cracked door.