After reading The Help recently, I immediately thought about some of the things my friend and mentor, Rubel Shelly, taught me about the intersection of faith and race. For a year, almost every Monday while I was in grad school, Rubel and I (along with a few other friends) met to talk about faith, ministry, calling, and story. We began this “experiment” by speaking our stories to each other (one tool is called genograms). The following is based upon my recollection of one conversation on a Monday afternoon in Nashville.

Rubel faced a tough situation while working as a young minister just outside of Memphis. Following the assassination of Dr. King, Rubel preached a sermon on the responsibility of Christians to love without conditions, to tear down the walls of racism (which, at the time, put Rubel in an obvious minority of Protestant preachers willing to do this). One church leader responded, “Do you mean to tell me what God wants whites and blacks to live together?”

“No. I’m saying God expects the church to be the church.”

The elders of this church asked Rubel to recant and repent of his message. He refused. During a tense moment in a meeting with elders, one asked him this question: ”If your daughter came home with a black man you’d be okay with it?”

“I’d rather her marry a black man with a heart like Jesus than a white man with a heart like yours,” responded the preacher. You won’t be surprised to know that Rubel was no longer employed as a preacher for this congregation. Did he have a job? No. Did he have a calling? Yes.

I was curious as to the relationship of Rubel’s upbringing and his bold conviction. We don’t act courageously in difficult moments unless we’ve been training and preparing for the difficult moments. Rubel had clearly been trained for this conversation.

In short, Rubel explained that, as a child, he was deathly sick. He was afraid he wouldn’t live past youth. While his mother and father worked hard to provide for the family (maintaining a family store and home) Odessa Porterfield–the Help–tended to Rubel on a daily basis. They forged a bond. They became friends.

How could a white preacher have the chutzpah to act differently in a tense moment? It was because he’d learned from an early age to “see the world” differently. Because he “saw” differently he was ready for the moment. Odessa’s love and tender care had been carefully infused into Rubel’s spiritual DNA.

To this day, Rubel and Odessa are good friends. They live less than an hour from each other in Detroit/Metro Detroit.

There are still walls in our cities that need to be torn down. Can you see those walls? What do you intend to do about it?