Resilience, Forgiveness & the Courage to Move Forward
As I prepare for our upcoming Journey to Charleston, I keep thinking about the stories we choose to carry forward.
Charleston is extraordinarily beautiful, but its history is also filled with enormous pain - from slavery and the domestic slave trade to the murders at Mother Emanuel AME Church. And yet Charleston is also filled with stories of resilience.
One of the people our group will meet is Lee Bennett, a historian at Mother Emanuel. Through Lee and others we will learn not only about what happened there, but about a congregation that has endured, rebuilt, resisted and continued to serve its community for generations.
It raises questions I have been thinking about a great deal: What does it mean to forgive? Does forgiveness require forgetting? How do we confront painful history without allowing that history to define our future?
These are not just questions about Charleston. They are questions for all of us.
At JTC Experiences
, we believe that learning history is only the beginning. We want to create opportunities to listen to one another, wrestle with difficult questions, and discover how stories of courage and resilience can help us determine what we do next.
That is the journey.
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