One of my favorite miracles happens in Mark 8. While Jesus was walking through Bethsaida, some people brought a blind man to him and begged for a supernatural intervention. Jesus agreed, though what he did next is a bit odd. He initiated the healing process by spitting into his hands. I can’t help but wonder what the blind man thought as he listened to the famous and powerful rabbi form a spitball.
Once Jesus had accumulated the appropriate amount of divine saliva, he wiped it across the eyes of the blind man. He then asked, “Do you see anything?” (v. 23).
The blind man was uncertain if healing had taken place. There was noticeable progress, as now he was able to see shadows, but his inability to process images showed that the healing was far from complete. The blind man responded to Jesus by simply saying, “I see people; they look like trees walking around” (v. 24).
This miracle has been a parable for my own white-awake journey. Like the blind man, I’ve experienced the healing touch of Jesus. I’ve had transformational moments when I went from utter blindness to being able to see the light.
But as beautiful as these have been, I’ve often found myself disoriented and saying a version of the same thing as the blind man. I still mistake people for trees, reminding me that the healing is not yet complete. In the words of the influential twentieth-century evangelic David Martyn-Lloyd Jones, I am “stuck between touches.”
Drew Hart, the African American author of The Trouble I’ve Seen, tells a story that I’ve come back to often when thinking about the disorientation that often accompanies the cultural identity journey. Hart recounts an experience at a conference focused on faith and justice. While he looked forward to the conference as a whole, he most eagerly anticipated the invitation-only small-group conversation for those involved with addressing racial justice. The topic was the incompatibility of white supremacy and faith in Jesus Christ, and as an activist and theologian, this was a conversation he longed to have.
Hart went to the meeting wondering what the transparency level would be and left pleasantly surprised by the combination of candor and grace. There was honest conversation around the difficulty of working against the ideology of white supremacy but also a clear sense that faith was motivating each of the individuals to move toward a kingdom ideology of human equality, even when the cost seemed high.
Hart walked away from the meeting feeling renewed and invigorated. As he prepared to return to the general session, a white woman from the group tapped him on the shoulder and asked if they could debrief together for a few minutes. He wasn’t sure what she needed or why she chose him, but he agreed.
They found a seat out of the path of traffic, and she told him she perceived him to be a safe person to process the disorientation with and then said her emotions had felt charged by the meeting. She took a few stabs at attempting to name what was bothering her and finally decided to put it in the form of a question: “What did you think about how people were saying white people can’t be Christian?”
This question surprised him, because nothing even close to that had been said. He thought the discussion had separated the conversation about white superiority from the conversation about individuals who are white, and he hadn’t heard anything about white people being unable to be Christians. So he assumed she had misheard what was being said and then took the time to contrast the system of whiteness with the inherent human value of white individuals affected by that system. He reassured her that the conversation was attacking neither the humanity of white people nor their Christianity.
Though his response was cogent and clear, it did little to calm her. In fact, with each additional clarification, her sadness grew. Finally, uncontrollable tears began to flow down her face.
Hart paused, contemplating what he would do next. “White tears” like those were nothing new for him. Because the contents unearthed during explorations of race can be so overwhelming—and at times even threatening—to white people who are new to the conversation, significant feelings often need to be accommodated for those in the early stages of the journey. Seasoned crosscultural facilitators know this.
Yet this woman hadn’t presented herself as new to the conversation of race. She understood that it was an invitation-only small group and that it had been billed as an opportunity to have candid conversations about racial justice. The fact that she chose to attend meant that she viewed herself as more than a beginner. As such, Hart decided to engage her at a more advanced level and to treat her like an adult.
Instead of jumping to reassure her at the point of her emotional fragility, as he sometimes did with people new to the cultural identity journey, Hart urged her to stay with her feelings for as long as she could. He encouraged her to embrace and analyze the feelings of disorientation and then asked her to consider some reflection questions. She was game for doing her best, so he proposed some questions like these:
Hart was gracious but firm as he led her through this process, and then he brought her to the disorientation, which is being explored in this chapter. He asked her to consider this: Was it possible that her conflicting emotions from this conversation were a sign that she was drawing too much of her sense of worth from being white? Was it possible that in the development of her identity and sense of self-worth cultural cues about whiteness were playing a more formative role than the words of God were?
This story illustrates the disorientation that consistently accompanies moving from blindness to sight. Like the man who had been partially healed of blindness in Mark 8, the woman in this story found herself “stuck between touches.” On one hand, she had already embarked on an important journey of transformation—she would have never been drawn to an intimate conversation on racial justice if she hadn’t. On the other hand, she wasn’t nearly as far along as she had hoped, a discovery that came the hard way at the small-group meeting.
I relate to the story of this woman, as disorientation has accompanied my cultural identity process at every stage. My journey began in the Willow Creek days with a series of light bulbs on race going off. But as I pondered how to move forward, I could find nothing inside other than a vague disorientation. My journey continued with the launch of Metro 212 and the dream of building a culturally diverse ministry. But when I was unable to reach beyond my white community, I became overwhelmed by disorientation. Then I met with the four pastors, desperate for answers to my growing list of questions. Instead of finding clarity, I came away feeling even more disoriented. That pattern has remained true at River City as well. Each era of growth for our community has been beautiful but has also overlapped with confusion about what to do next.
Disorientation is an unavoidable stage if you embark seriously on a cultural identity journey, so it’s not worth investing energy in a futile attempt to avoid those feelings. It’s more helpful to understand why we feel disoriented and to learn to push forward even as we feel uncertain of our footing.
As you follow the transformational path from blindness to sight, a variety of factors may lead to disorientation. Each is important to understand, and each needs to be conquered if you are to keep moving forward. Here are the four most significant contributors to the disorientation stage:
In chapter one, I shared about the day I discovered my world was white. It took me so long to discover that because I would have argued the opposite if given the chance. In my elementary school years, I lived in an all-white neighborhood bordered by an all-black neighborhood. So I had at least peripheral contact with kids of color in my age range. Then, due to the way our neighborhood was zoned, I spent my junior high years in a mostly black school. While that was the last point in my adolescent life when I was heavily immersed in a nonwhite culture, it set the stage for me to develop and maintain crosscultural relationships through my teenage, college, and post-college years. These relationships made it easy to dismiss the possibility that I had a white perspective on life.
That’s why I initially fought back when my first mentor on race proposed that my world was cut off from the voices of people of color. I was quick to point to the demographics of my childhood neighborhood, my junior high experience, and most importantly, my small but real roster of friends who weren’t white. Not until he gave me the self-reflection exercise did my vantage point finally change. Again, rather than allowing me to gauge my cultural identity using nominal relationships with people outside my life circles, he challenged me to assess the four voices that were shaping me: friends, mentors, preachers/teachers/theologians, and authors of the books I was reading.
Well, as it turns out, I’m not the only one living in an all-white world. In his standup routine on race, entitled “Kill the Messenger,” Chris Rock highlights the segregated nature of white America, saying, “All my black friends have a bunch of white friends. And all my white friends have one black friend.” Data shows that across the country, this is more than just a funny joke—it’s our reality.
For example, an article on friendships across racial lines gives an overview of the results of a Public Religion Research Institute study of racial segregation. The study measured the percentages of a typical white person’s friendship network. In a one-hundred-friend scenario, the data showed that the average white person has ninety-one white friends; one each of black, Latino, Asian, mixed race, and other races; and three friends of unknown races. So, when comparing the social network of black Americans to white Americans specifically, the results showed that white Americans had an astonishing ninety-one times as many white friends as black friends.1
Dr. Robin DiAngelo, a professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University, is widely considered to be an authority in this area. She lectures nationally on the nature of white culture and codesigned, developed, and delivered the City of Seattle Race and Social Justice Initiative Anti-Racism training. She wrote a widely referred to piece entitled “White Fragility,” pointing to social segregation as the number-one reason for the term. In it, she wrote,
The first factor leading to White Fragility is the segregated lives which most white people live. . . . Even if whites live in physical proximity to people of color (and this would be exceptional outside of an urban or temporarily mixed class neighborhood), segregation occurs on multiple levels, including representational and informational. Because whites live primarily segregated lives in a white-dominated society, they receive little or no authentic information about racism and are thus unprepared to think about it critically or with complexity. Growing up in segregated environments (schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, media images and historical perspectives), white interests and perspectives are almost always central. An inability to see or consider significance in the perspectives of people of color results.2
So the first reason white people experience disorientation is a lack of exposure to authentic interaction and engagement with race. For the most part, white Americans are raised in and continue to live in segregated settings. Even when a person has contact with people of color, rarely do relationships deepen to the point of exchanging meaningful ideas about the system of race. Therefore, it’s important to acknowledge our “representational and informational” segregation.3 In chapter ten, I propose a number of different ideas for reversing this trend and actively encourage finding new ways to become proximate to and to learn from those whom we are segregated from.
I was recently invited to join an intentionally multiethnic small group of pastors from the city of Chicago to meet once a month over a year. The white pastor who launched the group had experienced the beginnings of a racial awakening, and he was becoming restless over the state of racial affairs in the city. This is understandable, as the larger church in Chicago is just as segregated as its individual neighborhoods, and his conviction was growing that clergy should lead the way in demonstrating unity across racial lines.
I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly, but I’ve become cynical about attempts like his. I’ve participated in a number of similar endeavors over the years, and they rarely have staying power. A big reason why, unfortunately, is that the white pastors in the group run out of steam quickly. When their investment decreases, the clergy of color get discouraged, and the group disbands. That being said, I appreciated the enthusiasm of this pastor. He had recruited a number of pastors of color into the group, so I willingly joined.
The convening pastor brought a printed agenda to the first meeting and was excited to propose some issues that he thought this multiethnic group could address. The conversation started with his agenda points but quickly changed course toward issues of racial justice. The pastors of color were gravely concerned about violence, poverty, and a host of other challenges affecting the communities where they were serving, and those issues dominated the conversation.
When we gathered a second time, the convening pastor made another attempt at facilitating a conversation around his prepared agenda. But racial justice quickly became the center again, and we had another robust discussion about if and how we could partner to address the challenges facing our communities.
When the third meeting came, the convening pastor shared that he was confused about how he should participate. He confessed that he had been hoping to discuss a number of issues, particularly around church leadership and theology, but those issues were being eclipsed by the issues associated with racial justice.
One of members immediately challenged this notion and attempted to reframe the lead pastor’s frustration as an opportunity for growth: “Maybe you came into this group looking to grow in one area, but God had a plan for you to grow in a different area.”
The pastor replied, “Maybe—” then paused, apparently trying to decide how honest he wanted to be. He chose to be forthright (for which I was grateful) and finished his thought: “One of the challenges I feel with being a pastor in general is managing my time and my energy. I have only so much of it to give. When I get a chance to talk with other pastors about theology and church leadership, I feel energized, and it seems clear that it’s a good use of my time. But if I’m honest, these issues around race make me feel drained, and I walked away from the first two discussions feeling completely tired.”
His comments hung in the air for what seemed like an eternity, and finally a black pastor responded with the perfect combination of truth and love. He looked this white pastor in the eye and said, “If you think you’re tired, imagine how I feel. You’re talking about this once a month for two hours, and then you go back into environments where you can stop thinking about these issues. I don’t ever get the opportunity to turn this conversation off. The livelihood of my family depends on these issues. The livelihood of my congregation depends on these issues. I don’t have the luxury to pick and choose when I talk about this. If the Christian faith doesn’t speak to these issues in my community, then that faith would be irrelevant.”
Nobody was sure how the white pastor would respond, but to his credit, he was gracious and receptive. After pondering the words of this black pastor, he admitted that he’d never considered how privileged he was to be able to come in and out of conversations without any real cost. He also acknowledged that “tired” for him couldn’t compare to the fatigue of being a person of color talking about issues of race on a daily and even hourly basis. His confession opened a door to a new level of growth in his cultural identity process and positioned him to go to new depths in his journey from blindness to sight.
His story also is a helpful illustration of how stamina plays a major role in the disorientation stage for white people. One of the manifestations of privilege that comes with white skin in America is being sheltered from having to engage with “race-based stress,” a term DiAngelo uses when describing white fragility. “White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress,” she says. “This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility.”4
It’s hard to dispute the fact that the experience of growing up white in America is different from growing up as a person of color. We’ve already explored the racial stress that comes with the development of cultural identity for people of color in America; they are consistently measured against the white norm and have to find a way to reconcile their own worth in light of the mixed messages culture sends to them. This stress is both unavoidable and significant in cost. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a silver lining, but one result of this reality is that it builds stamina in those who are consistently exposed to it—a stamina that white people do not possess.
Therefore, when white people decide to engage in meaningful cultural identity processes, we’re choosing to say no to the privilege of avoiding race-based stress, and that direction should always be encouraged. With that being said, we also need to realize that the privilege of mobility does not disappear with this positive movement; we will continue to be able to choose whether or not to stay engaged once we’re exposed to race-based stress. In DiAngelo’s words, when our “racial comfort” is challenged and our low stamina for engaging racial stress is revealed, we need to find a way to stay in the game.
DiAngelo often tells her audience that white people tend to confuse comfort with safety, and that can be a helpful idea when navigating the disoriented stage. Because our stamina is low and tolerance for racial stress is weak, we often have conversations about racial justice being unsafe (consider the opening story from Drew Hart as an example of this). But it’s rare that these situations are actually unsafe; they’re uncomfortable because we aren’t accustomed to that level of discourse.
So the second reason white people experience disorientation is due to having little stamina for race-based stress. To be white is to be sheltered from that type of stress. The hopeful news is that stamina is like a muscle in that it can be strengthened through training and exercise. When you engage with difficult topics, as you’re doing right now, you develop a more muscular approach to staying engaged.
Lecrae is a successful hip-hop artist and Grammy winner, and his rise to fame was largely based on the support of his white evangelical fan base. This same group makes up most of his one million–plus Twitter following, and many of them were grateful that in the early years of his career he rarely talked about race. But that was also the reason many of them turned on him when he posted a tweet with a photo on a Fourth of July weekend. The photo showed a group of African Americans in a field picking cotton. The caption read, “My family on July 4th 1776.”5
The backlash to the tweet was as fast as it was furious. Thousands of white Christians protested what they perceived to be an unnecessarily provocative message, and many of them called for Lecrae to take the tweet down. Why did they have such a negative reaction to a tweet that conveyed a historically accurate fact?
Part of this reaction can be blamed on denial. Independence Day in America tends to be a particularly difficult time for both those who are aware of our history and those who are not, and emotions tend to be charged when these two groups interact. But there was another dynamic at play as well, and it had to do more with Christian theology than it did American history. This thread could be seen throughout the tens of thousands of comments, but two of the more popular responses summarize it well:
Done supporting you bro. You make everything a race issue lately instead of a gospel issue.
The race card needs to go, and Christ needs to be at the center.
The charge leveled at Lecrae was the same charge that every Christian who does justice work in the name of Christ hears at some point: He was accused of making everything a “race issue” instead of a “gospel issue.”
This is problematic in many ways, but most pressing is the way in which it bifurcates our understanding of the gospel. For reasons that go beyond what I can explore in this section, American Christianity (particularly evangelicalism) has often lost sight of a holistic understanding of the gospel. There’s an emphasis on proclamation of the good news, but it tends to be theologically disconnected from demonstration of that good news. There’s an emphasis on loving God as expressed in the Great Commandment, but it’s theologically disconnected from loving neighbor. There’s an emphasis on being reconciled to God through Christ, but it’s theologically disconnected from being sent into the world by Christ as ambassadors of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:20).
These are sweeping statements, of course, and by speaking so broadly I risk overstating the issue. But that doesn’t change my conviction that—especially for those who are white and have grown up in a theologically conservative Christian tradition—the chances are high that our theology is too limited for the work that lies ahead. Some theological giants have written entire works on this, and I explored how we can root ourselves in a more holistic theology in my previous book.6
Here’s one example to illustrate how significant the implications are of a limited theology: Dr. Klyne Snodgrass, a New Testament scholar who is widely considered to be an expert in his field, is dismayed by the persistent theological imbalance reflected by the way we often encourage people to “invite Jesus into their hearts.” This has been the dominant form of evangelistic invitation to faith in America over the past few decades, and it creates an assumption that the Christian life is primarily about asking Jesus to reside within the various dimensions of a person’s inner life.
Dr. Snodgrass is quick to point out that there’s nothing theologically wrong with this invitation. In his studies of the apostle Paul, he has found that there are at least five places where the language of Christ “in us” or “in me” is used. We can detect an imbalance when we look at this through a larger frame. When the apostle Paul wrote about the nature of Christian faith, he most frequently noted how we are to be “in Christ,” a phrase used an astonishing 164 times. If we’re told that Christ can come “in us” five times, but we are told to be “in Christ” 164 times, where should the emphasis fall in the way we talk about this? To draw out this contrast, Snodgrass says, “If Christ is only in you, then how big is Christ? Not very big, and you can tuck him away when you don’t need him. But, if you and all other human beings are in Christ, as well as all of Creation, then how big is Christ?”7
If our view of Christianity is limited to Christ being “in me” or “in us,” we will never have the theological resources to join him in works of reconciliation and justice. But if our view is expanded to see faith as fundamentally about being “in Christ,” our framework changes. Our very identity is seen through the lens of being joined to Christ, and we look to participate in the kingdom work Jesus is always doing.
This is one of the ways limited theology can prevent us from fully experiencing the life Jesus Christ is inviting us into. It’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg; much more could be said about the theological resources necessary for engaging the cultural identity journey. My point in this section, however, is to emphasize the way our theological limitations contribute to the disorientation stage, so let’s look at one more example to underscore the point.
When people are ready to become members at River City, they sign up for a three-week membership course. While we cover some of the specific elements of our local vision in that class, the bulk of the time is spent talking through theology. I believe that what we think about God shapes us more than anything, so the course focuses on some of the key aspects of God’s character and purpose. One whole week of the class focuses on the word reconciliation, the linchpin of almost every letter from the apostle Paul. I believe reconciliation is the single best word in the Christian lexicon for communicating the full nature of our walk with God, yet few appreciate the ways this word saturates the New Testament.
At the end of each class, we leave time for participants to share their observations and questions. During one of the sessions on reconciliation, a woman began to weep, and when the tears finally began to slow down, she shared a profound observation. “I have been part of River City for a year now, and though I love the vision for reconciliation here, I often find myself feeling very disoriented by it. I grew up in church my whole life, and whenever I visit my family back home, they ask me how things are going at River City. I tell them about what we’re doing, and they look at me like I’m talking in a different language. They’ll slip in a comment like ‘I hope they preach the gospel there too,’ or ‘I hope the social agenda there doesn’t overshadow what is most important to God.’ I find myself thinking those same thoughts when I’m here. But now, as I study these passages that are all built around the word reconciliation, I realize we are preaching the gospel here. In fact, how could one preach the gospel without talking about reconciliation?”
She paused for a moment and then asked a question that’s as piercing to me now as it was then: “How did I grow up in a Bible-believing church yet never once learned about the ministry of reconciliation?”
That question is a summary for what I’m hoping to convey in this section. Theology should inform the way we live each day “in Christ,” yet many of us have inherited a limited foundation as our theological starting point. For a host of different reasons, there has been a split in many conservative Christian traditions between a person’s personal walk with God (that is, “Christ in me”) and the missional call to join the work of Christ in the world (that is, “in Christ”). This split is dangerous and results in imbalance when a follower of Jesus resides too long on one side or the other.
If (and hopefully when) you follow Jesus into serious engagement with cultural identity, reconciliation, and other kinds of work associated with the kingdom of God, you will risk having your actions, motivations, and even maturity called into question by certain Christians. This will lead to disorientation.
At the beginning of this chapter, we learned about Drew Hart coaching a white woman through her intense feelings of disorientation. She was having trouble processing the feelings that were aroused by a candid discussion of race, so he had her reflect on a series of questions. Each of them was insightful, but there was one in particular that cut right to the bone. He sensed that she was having a crisis of identity, and he asked her if it was possible that part of the cause of the crisis was that she was still drawing a substantial amount of her self-worth from being white.
This question resonates with me because I believe it points to the greatest source of disorientation. At the heart of the awakening journey is an ongoing crisis of identity; it is an admission of an internal civil war that started long before we had the words to describe it, and it will follow us all the way to the end of the story. To be both a white Christian and a white American is to be caught between two warring factions. We may not like this, and we often struggle to acknowledge the depth of the conflict, but both of these identity sources remain at war as they vie for supremacy in our lives.
To be born white in America is to be instantly thrust into this war. Robin DiAngelo effectively demonstrates some of the ways that the ideology of white supremacy is designed to have an immediate impact on our emerging sense of identity:
Think about it like this: from the time I opened my eyes, I have been told that as a white person, I am superior to people of color. There’s never been a space in which I have not been receiving that message. From what hospital I was allowed to be born in, to how my mother was treated by the staff, to who owned the hospital, to who cleaned the rooms and took out the garbage. We are born into a racial hierarchy, and every interaction with media and culture confirms it—our sense that, at a fundamental level, we are superior. And, the thing is, it feels good. Even though it contradicts our most basic principles and values. So we know it, but we can never admit it. . . . We have set the world up to preserve that internal sense of superiority and also resist challenges to it.8
Becoming a Christian who is also white should mean rejecting the ideology of white superiority. Our allegiance to Jesus should enable us to recognize that this ideology is antithetical to the Bible, as is any system, ideology, or narrative that attempts to position one group of people as superior. The gospel should instead position us to draw our identity from a different source. We are told that we are created in the glorious image of God, saved through the atoning work of Christ, sealed by the Spirit of God, and delighted in by a loving Father. This is the raw material of authentic transformation.
The thrust of this book is to strengthen our ability to live from our identity in Christ while rejecting the ideology of white superiority. So, how do we manage the disorientation that comes with the internal civil war sparked by this struggle? In the same way that it would be naive for new Christians to presume that conversion comprehensively and immediately removes sin from their lives, so it is naive to assume that conversion keeps us from drawing our sense of identity from the ideology of white superiority. A good way to think of it is that conversion gives us the ability to begin divesting ourselves from the grips of white superiority.
The transformation of sight is often a painful process, just as all true growth is. As we move toward the brilliance of the light, we discover how much darkness was in us at each stage. This is a disorienting and confusing process, and if we don’t lean into the grace of God, we are tempted to depart from the journey of transformation. Therefore, one of the most important things to remember is that, despite the disorientation that comes with a crisis of identity, it’s a gift to be embraced. Each time we discover a new manifestation of white superiority that’s informing our identity, we can courageously admit it, confess it, and replace it with the words of God. We remember that we have been identified by God and named as the beloved. We remember that we have been baptized into both the death and the resurrection of Christ. We remember that we are new creations, sent into God’s world as ambassadors of reconciliation.
In this chapter, we covered four reasons we experience disorientation and then four practices for combating those: we must move from segregation to proximity; we must strengthen ourselves and increase our stamina for tolerating racial discomfort; we must grow and deepen our theology; and we must search ruthlessly for and assess the ways white superiority informs our identity.
While there are specific nuances to each of those four, this stage lends itself to a singular summarizing application. To succinctly state how we overcome the disorientation stage, we could use the single word resiliency.
In the bestselling book Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, Andrew Zolli (a fellow with the National Geographic Society) and Ann Marie Healy (a playwright and journalist) define resiliency as “an ability to recover, persist or even thrive amid disruption.”9
Disruption is a good adjective for what happens throughout the disorientation stage: It is disrupting to be exposed for a lack of knowledge or to run out of stamina. It is disrupting to lack theological resources or to discover that your identity is more compromised by white superiority than you want to admit.
The big question is, what will you do when you hit one of these disruptions? The resilient person recovers from disruption. The resilient person persists through disruption. The resilient person even learns to thrive amid disruption.
An experience during the early days of River City sealed this lesson for me. A group of leaders from each of the racial groups represented in our church committed to participate in a ten-week small group that explored issues of race and justice—and it was a transformative time for all of us. One of the key takeaways for white people in the group was a direct result of the admission that disorientation had set in. One of the women in the group said something like this to the people of color: “I’m honored to participate in this group, and I thank each of you profusely for the open and honest sharing. I love you and can’t believe all that you have had to go through. I feel like I have to make a confession though. My head is spinning, and I feel so confused. I’ve never been exposed to any of this reality, and I feel like my world has been flipped upside down. I’m having trouble understanding why God would let all of this happen, what my own complicity is in it, and what this means for my life going forward. I apologize because I feel like I don’t even know how to put one foot in front of the other right now.”
I remember hanging my head in shame at that moment. Her words represented me as well, but I was too embarrassed to admit it (especially since I was the pastor). I expected some sort of rebuke for her honest admission and tried to position myself to take it.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, one of the elders of the church said, “I appreciate you apologizing, but we don’t need your apologies. What we need is your resilience. It’s okay that you’re feeling weak, disoriented, and unclear as what to do. What’s not okay is that you quit because of those feelings. I need you to be resilient and to stick in the game and to walk alongside us who have no choice but to move forward.”