After receiving a horrific phone call threatening both himself and his family, Martin Luther King Jr. sat alone at his kitchen table, bowed over a cup of coffee, and prayed. Out loud.

“Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I am right. I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. And I can’t let people see me like this, because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.”

He later described sensing an inner voice saying,

“Martin Luther King, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And I will be with you, even until the end of the world.”

Reflecting on that moment, King wrote,

“Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared.”

While the gravity of that moment is one few will ever know, we have each felt a fraction of it—despair, exhaustion, the repetitive inner voice saying, I can’t. I just can’t anymore.

The hope is in the moment available to us that we often forget. Or maybe more honestly, replace—with a drink, a senseless scroll, an angry post, gossip, or simply burying it down deep.

Strength is renewed not by hiding our weakness, masking it, or ignoring it, but by naming it before God.

And lingering long enough at the kitchen table to hear God respond.