This shady street has Amazon trucks chugging up and down, dropping tiny packages of single items at people’s homes. Including mine sometimes. For this and many other reasons, climate change has our Ponderosa Pines swaying in massive windstorms every few years rather than every century.

I was talking to a neighbor on Saturday, lingering while on a walk. We were talking about the trees. Having been worried that some of the pines in his front yard would snap in the wind rather than just sway during the next storm, he had invited an arborist to come assess the situation. Two blocks from where we stood talking, a woman was killed by a falling tree in one of these storms a few years ago, and of course we’ve had long power outages, damaged roofs, smashed cars. Insurance companies trying to pretend snapping ponderosas weren’t part of the deal.

The arborist told him something that I’ve been thinking about. He said the trees are fine. Resilient because they stand in a close group. They will sway together, taking the storm as it comes. Bending together, maybe lower than they have before, but not breaking. Defiant. Alive. And not alone.

I don’t have to write the rest. The metaphor of how we can learn from ponderosa relatives at this moment speaks for itself, and if someone reads this they can apply it to their own story. Maybe it will become a theme of the next chapter.

I have had the opportunity to observe two ceremonies of gathering soil samples of lynching sites in my county.  The organization, Volusia Remembers Coalition, provided a powerful presentation so that we would visualize and feel the violence the victims of horrendous lynchings experienced.  As I visited the EJI Peace & Justice Memorial later that year, those stories stayed with me as I walked through reading the names of those who had been lynched.  They were not just names – they had a story…they were beloved and they had experienced violence. I need to always remember that there is a beloved person behind each victim of racism.  I need to learn their story.

As an everyday peacemaker, not only should I know the stories of violence and hate but I also have to dig deeper to hear and understand the stories of resistance and resilience.  Those are the stories that are often not told or are left out of the history books (especially here in Florida!). These are the stories that help me to see the targets of racial violence as images of God, as Beloved and not just victims.  These are the stories that will help me move from just expressing mercy to fighting for justice.

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!