I am a commitment to wholeness and integrity. I am a commitment to radical, courageous, unconditional love for all people. I am a commitment to truth-telling, liberation, and flourishing. I am loved apart from my importance. I am important because I am loved. I am exactly where God wants me. I will be fully present here until God moves me. To be a peacemaker, I will show up as an empowering cheerleader and empathetic advocate.

Small is all – how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. If we want the turmoil in the world to stop, we need to address the turmoil in our small circles. Our church is one of the greatest and most important spaces where we can practice the world as it should be. If we allow dysfunction and other destructive practices in our church, then we cannot expect those problems to change at the large scale. Instead, when we see people speak truth to power, we should respond with empathy and love. That same empathy and love should be extended to all people in pain, and I know there are people in pain across the whole spectrum of the issue we are entrenched in right now.

To care for our community, I will lean into mutual aid, where we “work to build a new world, where people create safety through community building and support each other to stop harmful behavior through connection rather than through caging.” Instead of “caging” ourselves and each other, we need to be connecting with each other. We need to be having these complex conversations in the context of our relationships rather than putting our ideas of people into different boxes of right and wrong.

Recently, a ministry coach and dear friend of mine taught me about the idea of backpacks and baskets. Her eight-year-old daughter says that God wants us to store in our backpacks things that we always need. Her friends tell her stories that they want her to put in her backpack, but her backpack cannot get too heavy. So at the end of the day, she puts it in a basket. She can carry the basket when she needs to, and she is still holding their story, but she is not carrying it in her backpack. Maybe some of the pain of our congregation needs to go in baskets, not in our backpacks.

Now is the time to get abundantly clear about our values and our hopes, as this time requires “the combination of adaptation with intention, wherein the orientation and movement towards life, towards longing, is made graceful in the act of adaptation. This is the process of changing while staying in touch with our deeper purpose and longing.” I wonder what it would look like to ask our congregation: what are we committed to? I wonder if we would find ourselves in alignment.

“May our wonder outmatch our wounds,” prays Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Black Feminist love evangelist. I want to lead from my wonder, not my wounds. May our wonder outmatch our wounds, and may we recognize that there are deep wounds that need to be healed.