It’s one thing to desire peace on earth. It’s another, very different, thing to try to figure out how to make it happen. I was reminded again of that difficulty on one of the most humiliating days I’ve had in a very long while. 

In the three months since my book, The Place We Make: Breaking the Legacy of Legalized Hate, released into the world, I’ve done a lot of talking with various audiences about the importance of acknowledging our nation’s history of racial injustice and working together towards a new kind of future. I’ve spoken on local television, on radio shows around the country, and in rooms with audiences ranging from seventh graders to historical societies to groups of pastors to teachers to churches to bookstores. Most of the time, these talks have seemed to go pretty well. I even received a standing ovation. 

So maybe I was getting a little bit too sure of myself when I walked into another room this past Monday. Looking back, I made some tactical errors before I even walked in. I took the gig without much advance notice, at a time when I had a lot of other things going on in my life. I didn’t have enough time to prepare. Despite that, I attempted to change up what I was planning to say. I wrote a new talk for this particular audience that diverged from the words I’d been using with previous groups. 

And when I stepped to the front of the room, everything started to go wrong. I didn’t have a good place to put my notes. The lapel mic was broken. I stumbled on my words and forgot what I was talking about. I failed to build trust with the audience. 

Then, things really deteriorated. As I was still flailing around up there, my host stood up, walked over to me, and asked me to stop talking and leave the room. 

I can’t remember if there has ever been a moment in my life when I felt more ashamed than I did right then. 

It’s tempting to feel defensive, like she overreacted or misunderstood me. But the truth is that I made some mistakes, and not just in my lack of preparation and failure to communicate. As I’ve reflected on what happened, I can see that some of my words, and the way that I said them, were hurtful to some of the people in the room—and that’s why the host felt that she had to ask me to stop. I’m still trying to figure out how to own those mistakes, and to learn from them. 

I knew when I stepped into the space of talking about racial justice from my social location as a white woman that it was going to be a difficult road. I knew that I wasn’t fully prepared and that not everyone would appreciate what I had to say. I stepped into the work anyway, because I believe that white people need to learn to participate in this conversation. That we have to learn how to enter into the work our brothers and sisters of color are calling us to. What better way to learn than simply to begin? Still, trying to learn how to uproot the white supremacy that has been baked into my own subconscious, while at the same time trying to learn how to talk about that work with others is… well, sometimes I fail. 

The really difficult thing was getting up on Tuesday morning and heading out to the speaking engagements I already had lined up for that next day. I was so afraid—that the same thing would happen, or, more broadly, that I had no business talking about any of this at all. 

I woke up in the wee hours that morning and raised my head off my pillow. There in the dark, I could see that my pillowcase was one that a woman from our church had made for one of my children. It was adorned with silhouettes of ski racers. The little image of a skier under my head reminded me of the words of a beloved former pastor: “Put your weight on the downhill ski,” he always used to say. “The life of faith is the life of putting your weight on the downhill ski.”  

One of the scariest things about learning to ski is that if you lean back, towards what feels like safety—the mountain, the place you’ve come from, the solidness of actual ground—you’ll fall down. If you want to be a successful skier, you have to put your weight on the downhill ski. To actually launch your whole body out into the air, towards the abyss you’re hurtling down into. You have to learn how to move forward.

So I did. I got out of bed and moved forward into a new day. I spoke again to new audiences. I don’t know if I said anything that day that moved anyone any closer to peace on earth. But I learned this about myself: that I can fail spectacularly, and then get out of bed and try again. 

Peace on earth is a lofty goal. One that only God Almighty can accomplish. But God uses us, frail and broken as we are. By the power of God’s Spirit within us, let’s keep stumbling down the path toward peace on earth.