I admire the persistence and faith of William J. Seymour, the pioneer of the Azusa Street Revival of the early 1900s. Several modern Christian movements spun out of that or were influenced by what happened there. He was blind in one eye, and he was a black man who was the son of former slaves. I learned that he was segregated from his fellow students who were white, while in the Bible school he was a part of in Houston led by Charles Parham. But he stayed and learned.
He landed in Los Angeles, convinced that there was a baptism in the Holy Spirit experience like what happened in Acts 2 and power that would come with that, both for him and for the greater body of Christ. He doggedly proclaimed the word he read in Acts 2 for a time before he ever saw what he was proclaiming manifest in his life personally and even as others started to experience it before he did.
But when that well broke open, it influenced far more people than he may have ever imagined and certainly has shaped the global Christian picture. The Azusa Street movement was a great miracle of unity for a time as people of different ethnicities gathered together through the outpouring of the Spirit.
Source: Clinton Scroggins - Posted on FB 29 Oct 2017, reposted 3 years later in 2020