The past is not the end of the work, it is the beginning

Worship this past Sunday, at the close of this year’s Alliance of Baptists Annual Meeting, felt like an awakening for me. The theme, “Reckoning with Our Roots: Repent, Repair, Reclaim,” was one I had been anticipating all week. I became aware that there is still deep work I need to do in the realm of justice and repair. But what stirred something new in me was being immersed in a story that does not begin with me; a story that has been unfolding for generations.

Our story does not begin with us. We are born into a story already in motion. And when we begin to acknowledge that truth, we become ready to take our place within it.

This is true in the most personal sense. None of us begins life as a blank page. We are born into the lives of our parents, our siblings, our grandparents ... into histories already shaped by love and loss, by beauty and brokenness. Those stories form us. Sometimes they are tender and life-giving; sometimes they are complicated and painful. Either way, they give us eyes to see who we are, where we have been, and where we might be going.

I was reminded of this in a profound way at Lake Street Church, where we gathered for the Annual Meeting. During Sunday worship, there was a clear and intentional acknowledgment of Native lands and a call toward reparations. The bulletin named the peoples who stewarded that land long before it became Evanston; tribes who gathered, traded, and practiced their rituals there. It also told the harder truth: the legacy of racism and white supremacy woven into that place, including the systemic denial of equal access to housing, education, healthcare, and safety, and the enduring wealth gap between Black and white residents.

What I witnessed there was more than acknowledgment. It was a community practicing what it means to live honestly within a story that did not begin with them. It was a commitment to remember, and to let that remembering shape their faithfulness.

Our siblings at Lake Street are doing the sacred work of reckoning with the stories that hold us all. They remind us that acknowledging the past is not the end of the work, it is the beginning. It is the posture we carry into every act of justice, every step of reconciliation, every attempt to repair the breach, every effort to reclaim what God intends for the world.

May we learn to do the same.

All love,
Leslie