This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. John 15:12 For almost 35 years I could be described by most well-taught and well-meaning Christians as a conservative evangelical. My ministry training from a predominately White denomination and church Bible school led me to change many of my theological and…
This is what the Lord says: They will come with weeping; they will pray as I bring them back. I will lead them beside streams of water on a level path where they will not stumble, because I am Israel’s father, and Ephraim is my firstborn son. Jeremiah 31:7, 9 (New International Version) It’s been…
It was another typical hot, sunny, Southern day. I felt the red clay beneath my feet heating up like hot coals. We were outdoors for recess, in a softball field, and no one else could hear the conversation, far out of earshot of the teacher on duty. My classmate turned to me, hatred and bitterness…
When you have a painful problem, what do you do? Some of us ignore it, and stuff it down deep in our gut. Some of us lash out at others, projecting our ills onto them. Some of us become workaholics, thinking if we just work harder and faster, then we can somehow overcome that irksome…
My husband and I process conflict from opposite ends of the spectrum. When I’m angry, I become a hedgehog who curls up in a ball and tries to become invisible. He morphs into a loud, intense rhino with defensive tendencies. Without really being aware of it, we were following the same broken patterns that our…
When I was invited to join an online panel conversation about race, mutuality, and community, I wasn’t sure what to expect. All five panelists and our moderator were at least loosely part of the same Anabaptist blogging community, so we shared some basic understandings about Christian discipleship as following Jesus, the church as a gathered…
It started out like any other day. I worked in a small National Tea Grocery store. It was Friday and the store was pretty full. The time would fly when we were busy, and that was fine with me. Other than a “price check,” it was business as usual. Or so I thought. I remember…
“You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in You” (Isaiah 26:3). Sometimes I write things that surely are not of my own doing. I reread this recently, and it laid over me like Ezekiel’s rain blessing. “Perfect Peace. The only peace that keeps us sane in the midst…
Sankofa is a word from the Akan people of West Africa (primarily Ghana and the Ivory Coast). It is both a word in the Twi language and one of over a hundred Adinkra symbols used by the Ashanti people (one of many Akan subgroups). It translates to “go back and get it,” illustrated with a…
When my family and I moved back home to America from South Africa, we were not prepared for what would greet us upon our return. The dead of winter in Boston with its frigid temperatures, gray skies, and snow were the least of them. We also noticed that the social climate had changed. Yes, our…
It was one of those mornings that I awoke to my own second guessing. I was not sure why I agreed to take a three-hour round trip to a church in a small town on the New Hampshire border, population of about 12,000, with only 4.39 percent people of color. A friend called me brave….
It was a cold and rainy night in early February. I stood in the dark, on the property of Mr. Jacob Burkle, whose home was a depot on the Underground Railroad. I shivered from the cold but also from a fear that had suddenly come over me from out of nowhere. Was I as safe…
A friend on facebook pled, “I beg everyone not to use #alllivesmatter.” If someone else had asked me not to use the hashtag, someone hateful—who didn’t believe that all lives did matter—the request would have been easy to dismiss. But because it was from a friend I trust, a wife and mother who worries about…
If my experience of trying to root out my racial bias and racist tendencies is at all normative, one of the most significant barriers is defensiveness. Though it makes complete sense for whites to feel defensive when the topic of racism comes up, if we want to bring this systemic sin to an end, we…