This summer, I gathered with four friends I’ve known for decades. When we get together, we often talk about high school memories, what we’re reading or watching on TV, and how our jobs and family life are going. We don’t always take the risk to dive into deeper emotional territory.
But one evening this past summer, we had a socially distanced campfire. The conversation turned to COVID-19, and then racism. We wondered: “How are you talking to your kids about racism?” And then five white, middle-class women in their late 30s, raised in the same predominantly white suburb, began to share some of what we’ve been learning about race and white privilege.
We shared ideas and resources that can help us and our children learn and contribute to a more just world. Sometimes it was awkward. We didn’t always know how to express ourselves well, coming from a culture that has taught us not to see color. But we started the conversation, which is a beginning.
Talking with trusted friends about something that matters deeply helped me feel heard and supported in trying to follow God’s call to do justice in this world.
This message is an excerpt from the December 2020 Gather devotional, “Singing, writing, moving, connecting: Advent rituals for uncertain times” by Jordan Miller-Stubbendick. Today we remember Philipp Melanchthon, renewer of the church, who died in 1560, and the Presentation of the Augsburg Confession, 1530.
Daily Grace has been offering you things to ponder and things to pray about for more than 10 years. For free. Women of the ELCA provides many other free online resources, too—see welca.org/resources. Please support Women of the ELCA at welca.org/give.
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