Nurturing Equity

In Spring 2020, just a few months after our son died and at the very beginning of COVID my husband, Jose, planted a tree in our front yard. It was a little baby, barely out of the ground; in Colorado weather I thought it had no chance of surviving. However, Jose was determined. Every day he fed, watered, and nurtured it. He was faithful and persistent. Sure enough, slowly, that little tree got stronger. Pretty soon, it grew more leaves and expanded in its heartiness. He kept nurturing and tending to it, refusing to believe it wouldn’t make it. After the end of the first year, he began to realize it might have a chance but he still didn’t give up. By the second year, it surprised us by how much it had grown but it still didn’t feel completely solid. Now, 6 years later, its trunk is strong, its leaves healthy, and in the fall it blazes red in a way that takes our breath away.

Things worth growing take nurturing.

Other words for nurture are: to “support, tend, feed, cultivate, stimulate, encourage, develop, further, foster, advance, boost, strengthen” and I’m going to come back to this in a minute.

First, though, it’s not lost on me how our hearts, minds, and realities are full of grief, angst, and action from the past week. It’s sometimes hard to know if it’s worth it to put out more words into the sea of so many. However, I decided to continue this series and make it to the end because any resourcing is worth it (only 2 more posts after this!). The tides turn quickly these days, sometimes in a matter of hours. I wrote New Ways for a New World #6 Embodying Our Values and posted it not knowing yet that Alex Pretti had been murdered.

Here we are, a week later, and I strongly believe the road to our future is paved with the dream for a more equitable society despite resistance to it.

The new world is crying out for more equity.

The old world wants to pull us back to the past.

It’s been 20 years since I free-fell out of my job as an adult ministry pastor at a mega-church over my desire to create greater equity in a system that didn’t appreciate it. The resistance to gender equity, socioeconomic equity, racial equity, and pretty much almost any other equity, runs deep and is so hard to shift. I have seen some change in the past two decades in church circles I used to run in with more female, queer, and BIPOC leaders in some systems. Yet, it’s also glaringly apparent that little seems to have changed, too.

It also makes me think of Minneapolis almost 6 years ago when George Floyd was murdered by police. A new wave of anti-racism work for white people rolled in strong (remember that?) and many organizations and groups were all-in for a while, but lifetime work is hard to sustain in a culture that loves immediacy and ease. Now, with Project 2025’s big win, those who aren’t from historically marginalized communities see what rollbacks look like, feel like, in new ways.

Equity is not our world’s natural state, unfortunately. Inequity—a lack of fairness of justice—is what we’re most familiar with as humans.

When I was processing through New Ways for a New World and what I wanted to include, nurturing equity emerged. However, this week I definitely began to question it as too soft. I went round and round on other possibilities and tried some different ones on. None seemed right. Then, on a contemplative walk alone in the New Zealand woods, I remembered how Jose nurtured the sh*t out of that tree so it could grow into what it was meant to be and how much intention he put into it.

Nurturing is not soft.

It’s fierce and focused. It is tender but strong. It’s relentless and consistent. It’s protective and intentional.

Nurturing equity is about supporting, tending, feeding, cultivating, stimulating, encouraging, developing, furthering, fostering, advancing, boosting, and strengthening more equitable practices in the places we live and move in. While there’s a faction desperately trying to pull us back, I hold hope that the collective desire for a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable world is stronger.

Look at this past week.

However, nurturing equity won’t come from only marches and words. It comes from courageously, relentlessly, faithfully, intentionally nurturing more equitable practices in the ways in our own lives, our families, our offices, our faith communities, our schools, and all the systems we live, lead, and love in. In the words of my friend Melvin Bray—“equity is a practice” (check out his work on UnLEARNING InEQUITY, new book coming soon, yay).

To live in this new world, we also can’t fight every battle, take up every cause, orlet the weight of every injustice bear down on our souls because we’ll have nothing left to bring to change. At the same time, we can’t let ourselves numb out, tune out, normalize oppression, and ride the comforts of privilege while injustices prevail.

What we can do is:

Catalyze changes in our systems that break the status quo on imbalanced power.

Stand against injustice when the most vulnerable can’t.

Center voices who have been marginalized and follow their lead.

Refuse to be part of groups and organizations that perpetuate inequities.

Create small pockets of freedom and diversity that model what’s possible.

Support new leaders in big and small ways--I’m ever-reminded the same minds that built the old world are not the best ones to lead us in the new one.

Make reparations through how we give and buy.

There’s so much more to explore in all of these topics, but today my hope is that we’d be creative and keep expanding possibilities for equity beyond traditional boxes, binaries, and borders. That we’d authentically live out what is unique to our contexts, stories, and systems and resist comparing ourselves to false standards or minimizing our contributions as too small to make a difference. That we’d let this question guide us: How are we each nurturing–supporting, tending, feeding, cultivating, stimulating, encouraging, developing, furthering, fostering, advancing, boosting, strengthening–equity in our circles of life?

All of it matters.

With you from an airplane high above the Pacific Ocean at the moment,

Next up: #8 for New Ways for a New World—Practicing Paradox. The previous posts 1. Owning Our Agency 2. Shedding Shame 3. Dismantling Binaries 4. Metabolizing Grief 5. Expanding Faith and 6. Embodying Our Values can all be found here.