This is a challenging story, particularly for those of us who are not black, about what it's like to go running in America when you are black. As Christians, it's essential to who we are as imitators of God (Eph. 5:1-2), to try to see the world through someone else's eyes -- to incarnate into their world. That's what Christ did for us. Doing so even to the point that it hurt.

If he did that to such an extent for us, what ought we to do for others? At the very least, we ought to listen and listen with a willingness to change. Incarnating calls us to sacrifice, to be uncomfortable, to experience a world we’re not used to. By its very nature, it will require effort and work.

That may feel daunting if you’re not used to thinking about someone else’s lived experience. And it may well be, if we had to do it on our own. But we don’t. Christ didn’t simply incarnate into humanity to save us and then leave us on our own for the rest of life. He came to not just to incarnate for us, but to teach us how to do the same for each other and to give us the power to do it. So that we might, indeed, be loving imitators of God.

We need him to do that for us because on our own, we can’t do this. But our fundamental belief as Christians is that through the power of the Holy Spirit living in us, we are not alone. We are indwelt by the very Spirit of reconciliation and the same Spirit that raised Jesus Christ from the dead.

So, it is now in our spiritual DNA to be reconciled and to incarnate. If this is true can we, dare we, really go against the Spirit of reconciliation by never listening to our brothers and sisters of color and never changing because of what we hear? We may be able to struggle against the grain of the Spirit in that not listening or changing, but we should not. Instead, we should move with the Spirit that now moves in us as we listen to what it’s like to run while black in America.