How Does It Feel To Be A Problem?

 By Rev. Kathryn Ray

“How does it feel to be a problem?”
 
The question fell to me to answer in a small group setting last February, when I attended Rev. Dr. Greg Ellison’s Fear+Less Dialogues workshop as part of the Young Adult Initiative in which NSBC is participating.  He calls it “one of the five most difficult questions to answer.”[2]   

Rev. Dr. Ellison- pastor, psychologist, and professor at Candler Theological School- did not come up with this question on his own. He draws it from The Souls of Black Folk, by the luminary thinker W.E.B DuBois.[1] Rev. Dr. Ellison also believes that this experience of problem-ness is something many of us- across diverse backgrounds- can relate to. When you are blazing a new path that those around you cannot see, when you are living or working in a space whose values, whose basic assumptions about life, conflict with your own, you may come to find that you are a problem.