The night before the immersion, I was a nervous wreck. I couldn’t sleep, and I was awake for most of the night staring at my bedroom ceiling. Much of it had to do with the trip itself. I was anxious about my first flight and all of the things that came with it—navigating the airport, being thousands of feet up in the air in a tin can, and ubering to the hotel once I landed. As dumb as this sounds, I was also a little bit nervous about being so far away from my husband for an entire week. The furthest I had traveled alone prior to this trip was Tennessee. But looking back, I think that a lot of what had me all worked up was that there was a piece of me that knew that this trip was going to be a tipping point. I knew that I would be changed as a result of this trip, and I was afraid about what that would mean.

To frame that fear, it helps to have a basic understanding of rural Ohio. Rural Ohio is a little more purple than people sometimes give it credit for, but even amongst more liberal folks, there is a noticeable chip on our shoulders. Resentment for progressive city types is common. There is definitely this sense that city folks view us as backwater hillbilly projects—as people who have to be taught how to speak, how to act, how to vote, and what values to hold. Furthermore, there is a general feeling that for all of their instructing, the progressive city types don’t want to be instructed. They don’t want to know, for example, why a rural Ohioan who is for gun control might own a hunting rifle. They just want to tell you guns are bad. They don’t want to listen to a person who comes from a dying coal mining town where the jobs all left when the mine went out of business talk about how they want the mining industry to be reinvigorated. They just want to tell you about how fossil fuels are killing the planet. So, any time that I want to talk about a social issue in my meeting that is more aligned with the left side of the spectrum, I have to be careful. If I want to reach people, I can’t come in righteous and yelling like the city people so often do. And while I wish that this was not the case, racial justice is seen in my community as a progressive, left-wing issue. I knew on Sunday night that much of what I experienced on the immersion would have to be repackaged to make it digestible, and as the trip stretched on, I became more and more certain of that fact. After all, how does one talk about something as important to discuss as lynching when the people listening don’t want to believe that systemic racism caused lynching—not one or two bad apples?

Honestly—and I guess that maybe this was the second part of my fear—by Thursday morning, I was pretty certain that I was just going to have to go back home and shout into a bullhorn about racism. I couldn’t see any other way around it. I was thinking that perhaps that would be my transformation—that I would lose some of my gentleness and that I would become an activist who didn’t care who I alienated if it meant that I could tell people the truth. But while we were at The Legacy Museum on Thursday, in one of the theaters, I watched a clip about Anthony Ray Hinton, who served 28 years on death row for a crime that he did not commit. In that clip, Mr. Hinton said that after being released nobody ever apologized to him. Nobody ever said that they were sorry. And right then and there, God did something in my soul. I had an epiphany of sorts. I realized that my transformation in regard to racial reconciliation was not the same sort of transformation that perhaps an activist would undergo. I am a pastor in rural Ohio, and therefore, the transformation that I was undergoing was one that worked in harmony with my call to pastor a Quaker meeting in rural Ohio. Rather than asking me to alienate my congregation with my new-found knowledge and my calls for justice, God was asking me to shepherd them through the confession, repentance, and repair process, and to help them grow in resilience.

I don’t know what this looks like yet. Or maybe, I’m still riding high from the rush of the trip. I don’t know. I have some discernment to do. But I do know that confession and making amends have been a game changer in my own life. And I know that they can be a game changer in the larger world. That’s why that “sorry” matters to Mr. Hinton. Its why restitution matters to Mrs. Collins Rudolph. Its why is matters that every museum, memorial, or tour we went on during the immersion started with the fact that African people were kidnapped and enslaved and brought to the United States. The truth will set us free if we tell it. And that truth will liberate us and enable us to make things right and to go forth and to make a better world. It will be painful, but it is necessary, and it is just the right call for a pastor like me in a meeting like mine. My two choices are not to be silent or to drive away everyone I know and love and to get myself fired. I can help people recognize the truth. I can lament alongside them. I can help them push through the guilt. I can discern with them on how to make amends. And I can help them stay rooted in hope and walk with them toward God’s Shalom. I can be a partner in resilience and in restoration.

This feels like a long-winded, out-there way of reflecting on transformation, but that’s it—this is my transformation. Let’s see what God might do!