Thinking Again and Again

Washington Avenue, Beloved,

Yesterday, Wayne Walker had knee replacement surgery. Thankfully, everything went well. After arriving at the hospital around 7:45 in the morning, I found Debbie in the waiting room and sat with her. Wayne had already been taken back for pre-op.

A few minutes later, a nurse entered the waiting area and called out, “Debbie?”

Debbie immediately responded, “That’s me.”

The nurse hesitated. “No,” the nurse replied, looking around the room. “I don’t think it’s you.” The nurse continued searching the waiting area. Debbie answered again. I answered too, “This is the real Debbie.” Only after several awkward moments did the nurse realize that Debbie was, in fact, the person she had been seeking.

Later, Debbie, Wayne, Ashley (Debbie and Wayne’s daughter), and I talked about what had happened. We both arrived at the same conclusion: The nurse appeared to be expecting someone else, and the nurse seemed surprised that the Debbie she was looking for was standing right in front of her.

I do not believe the nurse intended any harm, nor do I think the nurse consciously set out to treat Debbie differently. And yet, the experience reminded me how often our assumptions arrive before our thinking does.

Most of us like to believe we see the world as it is. The truth is that we often see the world through stories, expectations, and assumptions we may not even realize we carry. We make judgments in fractions of a second. We fill in gaps. We create narratives. Sometimes we are right; sometimes we are wrong; sometimes those assumptions reveal biases hidden even from ourselves.

As I reflected on that encounter, I found myself thinking about the events that unfolded during Elyria’s Juneteenth celebration. The situations are obviously very different. A misunderstanding in a hospital waiting room is not the same thing as an encounter between police officers and young people in a public square. Yet both have prompted me to wrestle with questions about race, perception, authority, trust, and the stories we carry with us before we ever enter a room or approach another person.

Many of us were taught a simple rule: “Do what the police say, and you’ll be okay.” For many white Americans, that statement has largely reflected our experience of the world. For many Black Americans, however, experience has taught a more complicated lesson. Encounters with authority often carry questions, concerns, and fears that many white people rarely have to consider. This difference is an inconvenient and uncomfortable truth.

As a congregation, we have publicly proclaimed that Black lives matter. Those words are important. But words alone do not exempt us from self-examination. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail that the greatest stumbling block to justice was not the openly hateful person but the white moderate who preferred order to justice and who was more comfortable with peace than with the difficult work of transformation. King’s words remain uncomfortable because they are not aimed at extremists. They are aimed at good people. Churchgoing people. Well-intentioned people. People very much like us.

The question is not whether we are good people. The question is whether we are willing to examine the assumptions we carry, especially when those assumptions are challenged by someone else’s experience.

The nurse’s assumption caused me to pause, and the events in Elyria caused me to pause. Both have made me ask: What am I missing? What experiences have I never had to navigate? What stories have formed my understanding of the world? Where might my own unconscious biases be at work?

Faith, after all, is not simply believing the right things. Faith is allowing ourselves to be continually transformed by truth.

Perhaps discipleship begins when we are willing to think—and then think again. Perhaps deepening discipleship begins when we listen longer than is comfortable. Perhaps faithful discipleship begins when we allow another person’s experience to challenge our certainty. And perhaps the Spirit still meets us there, in that uncomfortable but holy space where humility becomes wisdom, understanding grows deeper, and love expands wide enough to make room for truths we have not yet learned to see.

Thinking and learning with you, dear church,