It’s good.  It’s just a lot.

I have this hour to sit, because in a serendipitous accident, Terry, my friend who is borrowing my car for the next two and a half weeks, ended up flying back home at 11am instead of 8pm, and we swapped the car at the United curb and saved me trying to navigate getting into his building to leave the key, and both of us an uber ride.  So now I have an hour to sit and reflect.

This last week has been full. Full of catching up the end of month things, two birthday celebrations (one an 8 course meal, one a pizza party), a comedy show, a safe lot conversation, being quoted in a newspaper article, and a new executive director at work.  Tucked into all of those spaces were conversations about the trip I took the week before- little bits of processing, bite sized ideas, thoughts as they came to me.  When I went to pack my backpack last night, I saw the folder that Dr. Waters had given us right at the very beginning, and realized I had forgotten about it and all that it contained, and at the same time was glad to be bringing it with me on this next trip, determining to make time to sit with what is inside of it.

All of that to say, it’s easy for life to get in the way of dedicated time to process, and sometimes you have to grab it when it comes, and hope it all comes together.  I hope these thoughts come together.  I guess we’ll see.

The immersion, for me, was a bit of an existential crisis.  As I’ve shared often, information feels like it will keep me safe, and to be faced with the fact that nearly all of the information I’ve been given about history, society, faith, the economy- about everything- has been structured to keep me comfortable and calm and participating nicely, but definitely was not truth or reality, well, that undid me. It caused inner-rage, which usually seeps out as snark and sarcasm.  It was dibilitating, almost paralyzing- but I am thankful that I was in it with this group, and that we had done the prep work beforehand to expect some things to crumble.  I just didn’t expect it ALL to crumble- to feel at a point of starting over.

I do appreciate that on the very first night with John, my notebook was on another table, and I left it there- and in doing that decided to engage the trip with impressions and feelings and concepts rather than collecting facts and knowledge (to keep me safe).  Little did I know, that would be my struggle the entire trip- letting go of rebuilding the facts-card-castle, and aiming for something stronger.  something deeper.  something that requires all of me, rather than just my head.  Truth.

Truth.

Truth is bigger than facts, although it does involve facts certainly.  Truth is heart and soul and courage and motives and reasons.  Truth is sometimes brave, and sometimes cowardly, and always unvarnished (which I am not good at- I love a varnished statement).  Truth is ordinary.  I am leaning in to the ordinary today, and maybe also tomorrow.  I want to see the truth there.  The truth of the injustices.  The truth of those who take power.  The truth of how power is used.  The truth of who is objectified.  The truth of who is angry.  The truth of who is resilient.  The truth of who isn’t.  I want to feel with those who feel.  I want to see the truth.

This week I also got to be in conversation with Dr. Brenda as she prepared her sermon.  It was on the parable of the Good Samaritan, and God has been working on her all sorts of ways to get her there.  She reached out to me, because we have been in an ongoing conversation over the last several years about homelessness, as it’s an area she feels very out of her depth.  She has named that she feels unsafe and uncomfortable, and wants to examine the biases she holds.  She asked me to be her mentor in seeing our unhoused neighbors. I feel WHOLLY unqualified to be Dr. B’s mentor, but said yes, and that I hope she will walk with me in the reconciliation and peacemaking things.  I share this not to brag (ok, a little bit to brag, but only because I feel so honored and want to share with people I care about), but to say that she’s such an incredible model to me.  She saw a bias that she’s holding on to, and can’t seem to get past on her own, and found someone who seems to have a grasp on it and asked for help.  She preached a sermon today not from a place of expertise or mastery of the skill, but from a place of recognizing her need for growth, and leaning in.  There were so many ways she could have taken the easy way out- picked a different parable, taught from the racial reconciliation angle, NOT asked me to enter in- but she wants to truly grow, so she did the brave and harder thing.  I want to truly grow, so I am doing the brave and harder thing.

I am working on the relearning, because I really do need to relearn so much of my foundation. But I’m not hiding there.  My friend Alton has been asking me every time he sees me how my processing is going, which is a gift that he does not owe me as a Black man.  Dr. B has offered to “chop it up” with me regularly as I work out how to invest locally.  Brandon has shared a resource about learning about Seattle, and the racial incidents that have happened here.

In Dr. B’s sermon today, she named that we all go to Quest because we LIKE going to a “woke” church.  That’s why we picked it!  But going to the right place isn’t enough.  We’ve got to do the work of “waking up” ourselves.   It is high time I stopped pressing snooze (not to push the metaphor too far) and got up and got to work.

Right now, I need to get up and go to the gate, because boarding is starting soon, and it’s on to the next thing.  I am glad to carry this, and each of you, with me as I head into the ordinary- in ways that I hope to channel my outrage into organizing.

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!