Take a Peek at Be The Bridge: Meet Emily LeVault

Take a Peek at Be The Bridge
A conversation with Emily LeVault
Meet Emily LeVault. Wife to our Student Pastor here at Hope, Mom to two, an avid mac n cheese connoisseur, loves to make you laugh, and a fierce follower of Jesus Christ. In the fall of 2019 she was a part of Hope's Be the Bridge group study and has continued to participate in them since. She became a fan of Latasha Morrison's when first hearing her speak at Hope's IF Gathering in 2017.  The Be The Bridge model was created by founder, Latasha Morrison. Morrison’s organization equips individuals to serve as ambassadors of racial reconciliation with a unique Christian perspective.

"The first time our group met, I wasn’t nervous until I realized I was the youngest, the least experienced and the most uneducated in the room that night." Yikes! Almost immediately, there were terms I didn’t recognize, references I didn’t understand, and I knew I was out of my depth. And this wasn’t just any conversation to be clueless in - racial reconciliation matters to me, I honestly thought I was coming in prepared. One vocabulary word in particular was “Sundown Town”... and as soon as one woman mentioned it, the rest all nodded - except for me. I spent the next two weeks between meetings absorbing everything I possibly could, reading books, listening to podcasts and just plain googling. Through this process an ugly weight fell over me…a feeling of shame and guilt that I had lived so long in perfect ignorance of the pain and fear that is a daily existence for my brothers and sisters of color. That ability to live in ignorance of ugly things because they don’t effect you is called privilege. White privilege. And it’s enough to make you want to run the other way, because unpacking shame is the worst kind of work. But what I found through my Be the Bridge group was support and love and encouragement as I confessed that shame and that ignorance the next time we met. These women have leaned into me, loved me where I was at, and this community is the reason I was able to push through that shame to the next step towards racial reconciliation."