Sit Through the Pain With Me: A Path to Racial Reconciliation
ATLANTA – Every day we deal with false motives and people with agendas in our urban ministry. One of the most painful realities we deal with is racism. As I facilitate Dignity Serves training, which deals with the best ways of serving one another, we run smack up against unjust structures in our culture.
In three years of sharing the principles of Dignity Serves, I have learned much about race and racism and the loving and appropriate ways to respond. I am still learning.
Two very specific instances stand out in the past three years as we have gone through “lesson four” in the Dignity Serves curriculum.
Both times, friends of color have shared an extreme amount of pain and frustration as members of a minority in a world dominated by one culture.
One sister shared with a group recently about her journey. She has been stereotyped and judged. She has not been heard.
It was a joy to hear this sister tell this to the group of 30 people sitting in a circle. Even more joyful was witnessing her walk across the room to embrace and cry with her friend who has sat with her in her pain and her honesty. It was a beautiful moment.
This friend has chosen time and time again to sit in the uncomfortable conversations around race, racism and privilege. When she shared and her stories become uncomfortable, they did not leave.
The more I dig deeply into this, the more I discover the importance of listening to the pain of others and the hardships they endure as members of a minority in our world. For those who claim racism does not exist and isn’t a factor, I pose this question: Have you ever talked with someone who experiences discrimination? As my friend Ethan wrote recently, “If you think racism doesn’t exist, you’re probably white and have only white friends.”
How do we move past this? How do we heal as a nation? I say we learn the art of “Shiva.” In the Old Testament, when Job was experiencing a tremendous personal loss, he had friends who “sat in the pain with him”.
They didn’t fix things. They didn’t say the pain didn’t exist. They sat and listened. Most important, they loved.
This is why relationships are the first steps to heal this nation. We need to be with people who are different than we are. We must listen to their experiences. We don’t need to “fix” each other. We must learn to be with one another, in community, so the Spirit of Christ can heal us, and prompt us to grow together.
Finally, I firmly believe that we must find commonality through the cross of Christ. When Paul describes the “New Humanity” in Ephesians 2 being formed together from the division between Jews and Gentiles, he talks about the death of Christ brining these people groups together. The cross of Christ is vitally important because it deals with sin conclusively. And sin is what causes divisions amongst us.
Come, let us sit together in each other’s pain and find reconciliation through the cross of Christ.
