It’s easy in the spiritual life to slip into a myopic focus on one’s own individual journey with God. 

Then a book, a film, or, most powerfully, a conversation comes along and offers a new set of lenses that bring a much larger world into view. 

Tuesday’s webinar did this for me. It covered a wide range of topics on race, resilience, and spiritual formation. Here are a few eye-openers I jotted down:

• On mysticism: When the true mystic hears from God, it is rarely only about them. It is a call to gather people, to free people. God’s voice draws them into community.
• On fighting racism: Being anti-racist doesn’t mean being nice to everyone. It means to challenge the status quo.
• On seeing ourselves clearly: We have been trained as white American Christians to think we are the hosts and others are the guests. But anyone who is a gentile is a guest in God’s Kingdom. Being the guest is a position of humility.
• On hope: Hope is active, not passive; a fire that ignites us; a discipline we choose that leads to action, not wishful thinking that leads to passivity.

And Willie Jennings closed with these powerful words:

“Many of us feel helpless right now. Harriet Tubman shows us how to live in the helplessness doing the work of God… We are always in the hands of God. God is always holding us up… Now that the veneer of us holding ourselves up is being stripped away, maybe we can rest in the joy of a helplessness that leads us into the strength of God.”

After a live webinar passes it’s easy to feel like you missed the moment. But this one is well worth the time of watching the replay.

In whatever external or internal place you find yourself today, may the Holy Spirit grant you a heart-level awareness that you are in the hands of God.