LORD, GIVE US GRACE ABOUT RACENot sure these days if Indians like being called Red or if Asians like being referred to as yellow in skin tone. The little children’s chorus of years ago,was about
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LORD, GIVE US GRACE ABOUT RACENot sure these days if Indians like being called Red or if Asians like being referred to as yellow in skin tone. The little children’s chorus of years ago,was about
Race is definitely an area we need grace in. And there’s so much division in the world and on the net, we need a place where we can have a reasonable discussion. That doesn’t mean we all have to agree, but as it’s been said, we should be able to disagree agreeably. I’ve personally made a decision in my life to try to step away from the drama, because I’ve had about all I can take at the moment.And still, these hard conversations need to happen. We need to be able to step across the aisle, so to speak. We need to stop shouting our opinions and be able to speak openly about what’s happening. Otherwise, what is the point of a discussion board?I’ve mentioned on here before that my church merged with a black church three years ago, and my pastor is black. He is the kindest, gentlest man, and he loves all of us like we are family. We are a multi-cultural church family, and he doesn’t really talk about race, but he encourages us to love, honor, and respect the other cultures in our church. We have all tried to educate ourselves on the various cultures and participate in them. We’ve had two quinceaneras during that time, and we all helped celebrate with these young women into their culture’s celebration of young womanhood. They came to our church when they were toddlers, so it has been a beautiful thing. We’ve participated in the district functions that celebrates in a more traditional black culture style. My pastor has a burden to reach the lost, and we don’t care what race/culture that is…everyone is welcome!But the last few weeks have also served to allow us to see that some of our Black brothers/sisters are not always been treated fairly in life. When I hear of a Black pastor who has been stopped by police in his own driveway and had to prove he really lived there, and then be told, Well, now I know where to come if there’s any trouble around here by the cop…something isn’t right. I am not against cops…I hold them in high regard, but some things in our culture need to change, so we need to find out as Christians – what can we do to affect change? Does it hurt our hearts that people are being treated unfairly or are we only concerned about how it affects us personally?I think we can do a better job at handling this, by God’s grace! Please respond to Doyle’s thread…c’mon now, not everyone at once________________More of Him…less of me.twitter.com/camiracle77www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=691241499&ref=name
For the 1st 22 years of my life I lived far outside the ark of grace and mercy. I received no Bible training as a child, unless you count the three times I went to church/Sunday School as a small boy.Unbeknownst to me as a child, my entire family was racist. My father’s side of the family came from the South and had nothing good to say about Blacks or any other “non-American†peoples. My mother’s side of the family were Italian immigrants who for reasons I was too young to understand hated Blacks. As a matter of fact, one of my uncles was fond of saying the “only good n**** was a dead oneâ€. I had another uncle who was proud of having killed a Mexican because he was a Mexican. This was my learning environment growing up as a child.It was expected that I would share the same views as my family and so I did, that is until at age 23 I accepted Jesus into my life as Lord and Savior. Like every new Christian, I loved everyone. Including other races. This cause me no small amount of grief from my family, including my own mother who essentially disowned me for nearly 10 years. Seems that though she claimed to be Christian(Roman Catholic), our views were very different in how others should be treated. Later in life I had the great fortune to go to work for an Asian automobile manufacturer, and it was there that I was totally immersed in cultures far different than my own. I was forced to work alongside people of Japanese, Pakistani, Indian, African, Chinese, and several European cultures. As a matter of fact, because of the nature of my work, I probably saw more of these people than my own family as I worked long hours and travelled quite a bit with them.Do you know what this experience taught me? It taught me that people from every culture can be incredibly generous, kind, and loving. It also taught me that people from every culture can be mean, hateful, prejudiced, and downright despicable.In other words, people are the same no matter their ethnicity. It also taught me to look at people through the lens of Scripture instead of only through my own narrow-minded eyes when working with people so different than I was. Once I understood just how precious these different people groups were, it gave me a completely different perspective on just how much God loved this world that He would give his only Son to die for it. The old Sunday School song was right all along: all are precious in His sight. The end of racism begins at the foot of the cross, and I will believe that till my last breath. Instead of remaining largely silent on the issue of racism, I believe the church should be loudly proclaiming to the world that the answer is in the shed blood of Jesus Christ. Focus groups may well be beneficial to society, however any group that doesn’t point to Jesus as the answer is simply applying a band-aid to leprosy. My 2 cents, if it’s worth even that________________“Hell will be filled with people that didn’t cuss, didn’t drink, and may even have been baptized. Why? Because none of those things makes someone a Christian.”
Well said________________More of Him…less of me.twitter.com/camiracle77www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=691241499&ref=name