Being Different
Each night the wife and I read a Bible lesson to our children. Tonight’s lesson was about how God made us all different but loves us just the same.
In discussing the lessons, the kiddos went through people are different — our Uncle Ricky, who is in a wheelchair because of a stroke; sister, who is a girl; brother, who is a boy; daddy, who has no hair on the very top of his head.
Then we came to James and Jared, my business partners and friends who visited the house earlier today. James is well over 6 feet tall, and Jared is black.
“Uncle James is very, very, very big,” Joshua said.
True enough. Big being tall, that is.
“Mr. Jared has different skin,” Joshua volunteered. “His is dark brown, and mine is light brown.”
And then he went on to name off his friends — some who have dark brown skin and some who have light brown skin; some who are big and some who are not.
My wife looked at me and said, “That makes me happy.”
It made me think of this piece by Patrick Rhone, which I read last night. So perfectly true what he says:
Time will tell what will happen when my toddler reaches [school age] and this angelic looking blue-eyed blond checks that same African-American box. Her mother and I have already speculated and are prepared for the trips to school so that we may show our faces to the Principal to prove that yes, she is in fact, different.
Of course, ideally, and I really do believe that eventually, none of this will matter. Those boxes will disappear. If for no other reason than a whole lot of mixing will eventually make all of us so different that, in fact, we will all be the same.
Who needs to see in shades of gray when shades of brown work just fine?
