Doing the Work...Particularly When It's Hard

Monday, July 27, 2026

Happy Monday, my friends! Last week clergy from throughout the United States and beyond gathered in Charlotte, NC, for The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries’ (TFAM) 2026 Leadership Conference. Though I had registered as soon as tickets were available, by April I knew that I wasn’t going to be in the financial position to make the trip (airfare, lodging, food, etc. add up quickly!). While friends assured me I could have been more creative about funding the trip, I made the best decision for me though I mourned missing time with my TFAM siblings and all the beautiful saints who attend those gatherings. No matter how much I enjoy and appreciate TFAM spaces, my ability to engage in TFAM as a white cisgender man would never have been possible without the journey I’m on deconstructing, reflecting on, and owning my white identity and the inherent complicity in that identity with racism and white supremacy.

Last week, I wrote about self-reflection and about the amazing gift of communities willing to hold up a mirror we didn’t ask to see. I want to return one point from that essay because it applies to something much larger than any one person’s ego: a community that truly knows us will, at some point, show us things we would rather not see. Not out of cruelty, but out of love that cares more about who we are and who we’re becoming than our comfort.

I wasn’t just talking about individual character flaws. I was also talking about this: white people, me included, reflecting honestly on our complicity in racism, white supremacy, and the ongoing legacy of slavery.

This is different work than the self-reflection I described last week, and it’s also the same work. It’s different because this isn’t, for many of us, a private failing to examine in isolation. It’s a system we were born into, benefit from whether we chose to or not, and are responsible for confronting whether we feel personally guilty or not. And it’s the same work because it requires exactly what I wrote about last week: a willingness to be shown something we did not go looking for, by people and communities we cannot and should not fully control, and a commitment to stay in that discomfort rather than flee from it. That last point is often the most important, because one of the most powerful and most sinister parts of white privilege and white supremacy is allowing white people to ignore racism and to leave difficult conversations and spaces freely.

Here’s the harder truth for white people like me: we can’t just reflect our way out of racism using only our own mirrors. Left to ourselves, our self-examination on race tends toward the same self-serving pattern I named last week: we reflect just enough to feel better without reflecting enough to actually change. We say the right things, feel appropriately bad for an appropriate amount of time, and then return to lives largely unchanged by what we claimed to have learned. That isn’t reflection. That’s granting ourselves absolution.

Real reflection on racism and our complicity in it requires the same kind of community mirror I described last week, except now the community holding up that mirror is more often than not our own community and a community we have no right to rush or delay. Our Black and Brown siblings have been holding up this mirror for centuries, at enormous personal cost, and white people have too often looked away, argued with the reflection, or demanded that the mirror be softened before we’d look again.

Doing this work means we don’t get to set the terms of our own accountability. It means listening to history, to holy lament, to righteous anger, and to lived testimony without deciding in advance which parts we’re willing to accept. It means understanding that discomfort is not evidence that something has gone wrong. In fact, it’s often evidence that something true is finally being seen.

And it means recognizing that this work is never finished. There is no point at which a white person completes their reflection on racism and graduates from the responsibility to keep examining their complicity. There is nowhere to “arrive” and never a chance to rest on our laurels that we ran this race and received that prize. Faithfulness for white Christians is not measured by how quickly we resolve our discomfort or assuage our guilt. It’s measured by whether we keep showing up to the mirror, keep listening to the community that put it in place and the community showing up at the mirror with us, and keep letting what we see there change how we live.

Where in your own life have you accepted a comfortable version of reflection rather than the harder, truer version a community was trying to show you?

Let us pray: God who made us all in your image, and who grieves every way we have failed to honor that image in one another, give us the humility to stop defending our mirrors and the courage to look into the ones we did not build. Keep us from mistaking discomfort for harm and comfort for faithfulness. Bind us to communities honest enough to keep showing us the truth. Grant us the endurance to keep doing this work. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben +