Harmony in miscellany

Erika took me to Starbucks today, and I was so encouraged by her as usual. Why is it, I thought later, that we are so drawn to people who are just like us? Are we that enamored of ourselves, or just accustomed to be timid in the face of unfamiliarity? I know we all must relate on at least some fronts, but I want to figure this out a little more. It is at the heart of the way different races, genders, ages, the socially arranged – people of the world – relate to eachother. I have a small picture of what it all looks like as God perhaps will again make it.

California has been flavored by Mexican culture since before it was officially a part of the United States, and there is much that we learn from one another. I love what California is because of its strong Mexican heritage, and living on the East Coast for the past seven months has brought into even sharper focus how much I love it. Yet I have always had this concern for my lack of experience in living life among a group of people who are truly unlike me, because I when I think about heaven, I know that it will not be a giant white chapel filled with endless rows of white Protestants and Hispanic Catholics. Humanity has been designed in such a rainbow of culture, color, voice, and spirit so that something in me is uncomfortable only knowing two of the rings.

Going into Lynn last semester for a service project among middle school girls put this on my mind even more often. Elizabeth had just come to America from Africa less than a year before, Salina had lived in New York since she was a baby, and Mikayla was from Arizona. When there wasn’t much official volunteering for me to do, I was always content to just sit and listen to them laughing and talking with each other, admiring how beautiful they all were. I would pick up on a quiet hint in a lighthearted conversation that showed one of them was hurting. Sometimes a joke meant to make everyone else laugh wasn’t entirely a joke, and my heart would crack a little for her. Seeing a circle of girls all create something unique from the same box of beads, or hearing them make up stories together where each one contributed something completely distinct from the others, brought a strange kind of joy and pleasure that I can only associate with goodness.

The world is broken, and everyone living here knows it. This life infected with pain, suffering, cruelty and injustice can be like the “sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent” that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of during those dark years of segregated America, and we all await the “invigorating autumn” that will restore us to life as it should be, the good life. I know the good life is life as God sees it. He filled the world with people that are a different colors: ebony, cinnamon brown, pale white. People who sing, dance, yell, whisper. Right now many of us who don’t look like each other, or who don’t do the same things, stand apart and tragically judge or condemn or scratch the backs of our necks in awkward uncertainty as a response to what the King takes such enjoyment in. But one day, all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics who have realized the truth of Christ, will be able to join hands and sing: Free at last! Free at Last!

"To be a responsible person is to find one's role in the building of shalom, the re-webbing of God, humanity and all creation in justice, harmony, fulfillment and delight. To be a responsible person is to find one's own role and then, funded by the grace of God, to fill this role and to delight in it." - Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

By the way, Megan is making me laugh so hard and I cannot even attempt homework.

She is different from me. And I think I love her more every day with every little difference I notice.