Category: Legacy

I’m a white Southerner who gave up the Confederacy for my friends.

JMFambroughLeave a comment

Let me just start by saying I’ve re-written the title to this post a hundred different ways and all of them have scared me out of writing this article. It’s such a massively huge topic and I’m so…..white. And so so so late to the conversation. And so don’t have a clue to the decades of hurt and what racism feels like. I can’t go back and re-write history and I can’t undo the past. But I can tell you what right now looks like to me. This is my heart right now.

I went to my Dad twice during the writing of this article to make sure he knew I’d always love and treasure my family, and to make sure he wouldn’t be disappointed in me (he wasn’t). If a topic is a multi-hour teary and passionate conversation with my parents in the kitchen, then I absolutely believe it’s worth writing about here. I believe God has laid it on my heart for a reason, and that it’s important to share, no matter how hard.

Bear with me and please know that you, you reading this!, matter deeply to me.

I’m a white Southerner who gave up the Confederacy for my friends.

What a header, right? Let me explain. Growing up, my sister and I adored the South. We grew up in Florida, and had a Yankee mother from Ohio with generations of pacifism in their bloodlines, and a Southern daddy from Georgia with generations of fighters since the minute we landed in America. Those Fambroughs have fought in nearly every war up until my generation. Which means a lot of my patriarchal history is Confederate. I didn’t know them. I just know my grandparents and my parents weren’t racist and that was good enough for me.

I remember the first time a friend called me a racist for being a Southerner, I went to the bathroom and sobbed for 10 mins. When the friend’s sister found me, I was crying out: “That’s not how I see it. I didn’t mean it that way. I’m not racist. I love your little brother.”

I was so wounded that he thought that of me. Now I’m wounded that my pride had blinded me for so long. Growing up, I always was a bit disgruntled that the Daddy I idolized didn’t like the Confederacy so much. After all, it was his heritage.

He would quietly and wisely say: “The flag doesn’t mean what you think it means. The South stood for states rights but it also stood for slavery, and slavery goes against the very heart of the Gospel of Christ.” He is a man who doesn’t let politics in the way of Jesus.

The flag might have stood for something beautiful in the beginning, but it ended up being a symbol of pride for a world living off the profits of slavery. Seeing it means fear for my friends of color. It means that we may have valued our people a lot but we didn’t value them enough to set them free. It reminds my friends of color that their families were torn apart, killed, and sold. It reminds my friends of color of pain. It reminds them that we didn’t see them as people. It means war and it means slavery.

The historical South was beautiful for our white families. It was not for our black families. And that breaks my heart into a million and one pieces today.

The Sin and Stain of Slavery existed in my own heritage.

I know somewhere back there we owned slaves. It’s in the pictures.

And growing up I believed that states rights were a good enough reason for the South to have won. And I believe the South had some really good Christian leaders and some really dang good points. But slavery wasn’t one of them. As a Bible believing Christian, I believe slavery is one of the ugliest sins we can commit against each other, and it grieves me to think that my family followed a societal norm and owned slaves. I didn’t know those family members; I can’t say I’m ashamed of them. I can say I wish I could say we never ever would have done such a terrible thing.

I can say if someone ever came to me (there are lots of African American Fambroughs out there) and said their family was owned by mine, I would probably sob for months. I’d want to give them everything. And hold them in my arms for a really long time.

A few years ago, I wouldn’t have ever ever ever said this in public, and honestly, writing it all out right now and anticipating the feedback (and disappointment) I’m going to get from my friends who love the Confederacy makes me so nauseous I’m sick right now.

I’m not out to make enemies, honest. But I’m also not going to stay quiet about this.

The transfiguring moment I saw my friend instead of a cause.

Because a few years ago, I started really listening to my friends of color. I heard their tears as people were shot in the street a few blocks from their home. A town near us was almost ripped in half after a shooting. It is still deeply segregated.

One of my friends wrote the sentence one night that the man killed in her town could have been her husband. And my heart stopped. I’d been to their wedding. One white girl who could not dance, laughingly pulled in with two of her aunties to dance with all of them in celebration. I couldn’t imagine it being her husband. I couldn’t imagine it being her cousin. I couldn’t imagine it being her son. I couldn’t imagine it being all my friends of color I’ve loved so very much getting to know.

Suddenly I saw deep grief and pain. I saw the green grass torn open for all the caskets and how loss comes to us all: rich and poor, black and white, and the hearts that are torn open along with it. Grief is grief, and my eyes were opened to the racism in my country.

I saw my friends instead of a political statement, and it broke my heart. 

And I started REALLY listening.  I threw the “Us vs Them” rhetoric out the window as much as possible. I started ignoring labels as much as I could. I quit looking for political reasons or explanations and started looking for ways to see Jesus in others not like me and I asked hard questions of my friends. I traveled internationally. I saw outside of a white America and it struck me how not that great we were. I saw beautiful people from many cultures and I wanted them all to know Jesus and to never doubt His love.

And to never doubt God’s love because of something I said or did.

I’ll never forget the moment it woke me up.
It hit me like a rip current and dragged me out to sea of never going back.

I looked at all of history under the light of God’s kingdom, and I suddenly realized if I had to choose between loving and being FOR my friends of color in modern day America, OR romanticizing the Confederacy …. I was 1 million percent going to choose the one that mattered, and it wasn’t a dead war and policy. 

It was going to be my brothers and sisters in Christ.

Because I love them more than I could ever love a history where my forefathers sinned against the image of God (and yes, that goes back a lot further than 1861). And I love my brothers and sisters of color and want friendships and peace and unity with them more than I want monuments in the square (that will crumble into dust one day, and oh hey, Robert E. Lee didn’t even want them in the first place and asked not to have monuments made of himself), and more than I want people to tell me how wonderful it was that so many Fambroughs were so committed to the Southern legacy.

Statues aren’t worth more than my friends. Period. End of story. They’re made of stone and dust and they aren’t God’s beloved children and those statues won’t be in Heaven with me.

The Confederacy no longer mattered to me. Y’all. Y’all, listen. In light of a perfect redemptive history and the most beautiful Kingdom God is building and redeeming from our blood spilled lands, how could the Confederacy matter more to me than the precious ones who will be filling the throne room with me? And why would I let it when that’s a choice I can make?

This doesn’t mean I have to hate my family; I’ll always love my family’s history. I will always love my family and seek to understand and know more about them. But that doesn’t mean I should or will condone evil and sin committed in the hearts of men. And it definitely doesn’t mean I need to flaunt my family’s history when it was wrong. When I’m tempted to argue that my family members were all heroes and that they loved their slaves, I’m not believing or portraying the Gospel. We are all a little racist somewhere, and I’m praying God shows me the places where I am.

Slavery is wrong. But the fall of the South did not kill racism. It couldn’t. Only the Gospel can kill the sin of racism. And that is the Gospel we must preach. 

Let go of a prideful past built on physical bloodlines.

“For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” – Galatians 5:13

We cannot as Bible believing Christians, stand for slavery, which means we cannot revel or glory in a history (that could repeat itself) that promotes it. We cannot stand for racism. Or white supremacy. We cannot. We cannot. We cannot.

We cannot choose our family’s history over Jesus.

If we’re going to die on a hill for a cause, let it look like Calvary and like Jesus and
not like our own self built kingdoms that we treasure more than the one He died to bring us and to bring us into. 

We cannot choose our physical bloodlines against the blood spilled from the side of Christ for the freedom from sin for the nations. 

We cannot choose politics and a kingdom quickly fading instead of Jesus and His Kingdom that calls the nations to Himself and is building an all-racial church.

We cannot choose to be on the wrong side of this issue yet again when churches have been given the option so many times and chosen the wrong one. Choose Biblically.

Condemning racism and proclaiming our fellow citizenship with our brothers and sisters of all races should easily go hand in hand, but it hasn’t. And I haven’t done it well. To the people in the back who I’ve been racist to or spoken poorly to, please, PLEASE forgive me. I’m grieved, deeply grieved, by America in our current state and actions, and yet see that me carrying years of a romanticized Civil War may have hurt you deeply.

I renounce any and all white supremacy and have repented deeply to God for any ways I represented that. And yes, I swiftly gave up the Confederacy for my friends of color. 

But that doesn’t make me a hero. That makes me a convicted Christian who realized I wasn’t portraying Jesus as the Jewish Savior Who leveled the ground at the foot of the cross and called every slave free and Jews and Greeks equals {Colossians 3:11}. It doesn’t make me understand any better the generations of agony my friends of color have suffered at white hands.

It still means I’m white, and it still means a lot of days I feel the heavy guilt of my white privilege. But I hope saying this opens the doors to deeper friendships between us, and I hope you’ll continue to teach me what Jesus means to you as I share what Jesus means to me, and I rejoice that one day the guilt and shame that we carry around will be shed and we will join hands and voices as one proclaiming Christ as our King.

“For You were slain, and have redeemed us to God by Your blood. Out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation.” – Revelation 5:9

“EVERY nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb…” – Revelation 7:9

Choose Jesus and His Kingdom Cause.

Choose Jesus and You get to be a bearer of the love He sees in His beautifully made image-bearing people. Choose anything over Jesus and you lose that privilege.

Our God and Creator and King doesn’t share His Kingship with anyone; neither does He smile upon those whose words speak against His heart for the nations. The nations don’t always look like China or Korea or Guatemala. The nations are also your African American brothers and sisters and your friends of color who live in your world and hear your words.

Jesus, help us. Jesus, forgive us. 

I want my legacy to be that I chose Jesus over everything the world offered. I want my legacy to be loving my family, yes, but I want my greater legacy to be loving our bigger family full of those that don’t look like me. I want my legacy to be loving Jesus’s family.

Just like He loves me. Even me, a white Southerner who gave up the Confederacy for a greater Kingdom that calls everyone who trusts in the King “Beloved Son and Daughter”.

Glory, glory, glory. 

“All nations whom You have made shall come and worship before You, O Lord,
and shall glorify Your name. For You are great, and do wondrous things; You alone are God.” – Psalm 86: 9-10

Relationships that look like Jesus

JMFambroughLeave a comment

I remember visiting a church in my elementary years, and after the pastor read John 15:13 “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down his life for his friends.”, he said “It sounds extreme, doesn’t it?”. I looked around rather confusedly at the people surrounding me and then down at my Bible, and felt so out of place because it actually sounded perfectly sane to me.
It’s how I’d always loved: all in, no hold back, for forever.

I’d step in front of a bus for anyone I know. I’d feel bad for all the hospital bills my family would inevitably pay (and uh, the sadness), but that was what love did. Love….LOVED.

Love was all of 1 Corinthians 13, and also stepping in front of a bus for your people.

Now before you call my parents…..read the rest of the article. I’m quite safe, really. 

Relationships deeply matter

When I was in my late teens/early twenties, I babysat a lot for one of my best friends who was terribly sick during her pregnancies. I’d come over (invited & occasionally uninvited) and clean her kitchen and fold her laundry and play with her sweet babies.

She would pay me for babysitting, but the hidden reward was far greater …. there would be hours upon hours of conversation. I remember vividly tearful days sitting curled up on her couch (probably eating ice cream or chocolate pie) and pouring out my heart with all the “my world is ending” words I probably had.

She would listen and speak truth to me. She didn’t always say the things I wanted to hear, and sometimes we interrupted the conversation to have a toddler dance party, but she always always always made me feel wanted. We haven’t deeply talked in ages (so much work! so much school! so little sleep!), but when I hugged her on Sunday, I told her I missed her, and she said she’d missed me too.

In that one hug …. I could remember the years of friendship, kindness and care.
In that one hug …. I felt so loved and seen, remembered and valued.

She shaped my early adult years of a true, deep, lasting friendship.

And so today I wanted to write to you about relationships that heal.

Not the ones that break and then heal….we will save that for another time.
But relationships that heal unrelated pain….that in one swift moment, heal the hurt.

 The unexpected gifts of relationships

I only have to take a quick scroll through my Instagram or photos to make me smile at the dear faces that fill them. I will be the first to tell you I’ve been blessed with some of the best friends on the face of the earth. It’s no wonder I have a desire to love wide and long and go deep in relationships when I’ve received so so so much love myself.

When I was younger I wondered how people could say “She/He would drop anything/do anything for me.”, and then when life came crashing to pieces, I figured out very quickly how my people would do exactly that.

They pulled my family in to lasting friendships. Family dinners. Endless meals when we lost our grandparents. Late night Emergency Doctor/Nursing calls. Dog-sitting. Traveling to attend my sister’s wedding from out of state/out of the country. Hosting strangers in their homes. Prayers upon prayers whenever we asked or needed it. Gifts and cards arriving unexpectedly at our doorstep. Simple invitations to go out together, anywhere, just to be with us. Showing up with flowers and hugs and their kids to make us laugh.

I’ve had friendships show up out of nowhere in some of the saddest times of my life and wondered why on earth they wanted to be friends with little ole dramatic me….but they pulled me right in and loved me deeply and continue to be some of the dearest to me.

C.H. Spurgeon hits the nail on the head when he said this: “Friendship is one of the sweetest joys in life. Many might have failed beneath the bitterness of their trial had they not found a friend.” I’ve survived many sad days because of the joyful and incredible ministering of close friends. My life is infinitely better because they are in my life. Being together means real, deep conversations, and knowing they won’t give up on me.

They’ve sat with us in grief, and they’ve made us cry with laughter.

They know us. They love us. It’s been one of the biggest gifts in my life. It has driven me to see how our communities of friends reach past all the circumstances to be Jesus to us. 

Loving Well and Denying Fear

Just last week I received news that made me want to throw up and set me spinning into a very bad week. The very same day, I got the sweetest message from a friend who so kindly told me how the way I loved deeply inspired her to do the same.

She called me brave. 

I sat right down on the kitchen floor and cried. Being brave doesn’t make you feel brave.

I decided a long time ago I would do anything for my people to let them know they were loved. I definitely do not hold up to that to the highest mark that I could, but I try. Most days, I don’t feel brave (not even after a cup of coffee). Sometimes I don’t feel love.

But I refuse to let these short few days on this earth be anything less than being what Jesus calls us to be, and that isn’t the tepid, broken, shallow, fearful relationships the world calls love. It looks much more like sacrifice, more like courage, more like Jesus.

Real relationships say a hundred “I forgive you’s” and “I love you’s”. Real relationships pick up after months apart and remember to pray in the middle of the night for that one prayer request; they rejoice from afar and grieve losses from even farther. They do all this because we’re called to it. They do all this because we’ve been changed by it.

Real relationships heal hurt, love well, and deny fear, because we’re looking at Jesus. 

Real relationships survive on sacrificial love

Here’s the biggest secret the world doesn’t get about real love in relationships: it gives back more than you could ever know at the moment. Real love in relationships IS NOT temporary, only sticking around when it gets what it wants and then leaving. Real relationships don’t thrive on shallow love or rollercoaster feelings, they survive on sacrificial love.

We aren’t called to a worldly love; we are called to a deep, sacrificial love. We are called to more than the world can see in one lifetime, because love matters for Eternity.

We are called to choose meaning, choose honesty, pursue to strengthen our brothers and sisters God has placed in our lives, and yes, sometimes, it means leaving your heart on the threshing room floor and trusting that God sees how hard you tried.

Sacrificial love doesn’t mind driving 6 hours for a hug, because it meant the world to be there. Sacrificial love can turn a dark day into a day wreathed in smiles and peace. Sacrificial love often flows from the Holy Spirit speaking to your heart to move in a way that you’re scared to do. Sacrificial love doesn’t turn up empty, it always gives.

Sacrificial love doesn’t always look like grand gestures. It often looks like living life together. Simple voicemails. Encouraging messages. Rejoicing. Excursions simply wanting to “be with you” has moved my heart more than my friends could ever know.

Some days it’s having church friends over for dinner and ice cream. Some days it’s sitting with your friends in their sadness and not seeking to fix it. Some days it’s a really long hug. You know your people – learn their likes and loves, and take the time to show it!

By our love, the world sees Jesus. So: Reach out. Be there. Show up. Hug. Cry. Laugh. Cheer. Love hard. Value others. Reach across unnecessary lines and labels. Be Jesus. 

Jesus, the Friend Who Never Leaves

You will never know how much it means to you that Jesus will never leave until someone you love leaves you.

There is no One like Him, and never will be. The Faithful Friend Who left everything easy to bear your pain so there would be a peaceful morning and a shimmering Forever.

The Brother Who adopted you into an inheritance you didn’t deserve or expect, Who joyfully pulls you in, Who calls you “Brother/Sister” “Beloved”, Who longs for you to sit next to Him at the table, at the grand Wedding Feast. Who has promised never to fail you.

Every single page of the Bible speaks of the lengths that He will go to to tell His people how deeply He loves them, and how He will never ever let them go. The ultimate Friend who dropped everything to rescue you from the night. The King turned Servant.

It has been one of my deepest consolations this year that when “good” relationships fail and fall apart because of our broken world; Jesus is immune to that. Jesus is not human: Jesus will never break His promise to us, Jesus will always stay, will always love.

Jesus bore all the pain of those relationships in His agonizing hours upon the cross, and when He said “It is Finished”, He proclaimed victory over that agonizing, crushing pain of love lost. Victory over torn-apart families, severed marriages, and broken hearts.

The empty tomb shouts of a victory that we cannot see fully yet, but are promised. 

The pain will end, and we will joyfully rejoice and celebrate with all Who have been redeemed by the same love that covers us all. We will live fully healed in a world that will have no sin left to break hearts and relationships. We shall sing of the ways He has redeemed the pain and hurt.

We shall shine with the radiance of the One Who loves us so unbelievably well. We will rejoice in the relationship that healed all our sin, brokenness and agony in one Day.

Jesus, the Friend Who Never Leaves. Jesus, the One Who binds us together in love.

I choose deep relationships and sacrificial love because it’s how I know how to be Jesus. 

And it’s worth it.

{amazing image by Shannon Ashley Photography}