While in France, I had the rare, incredible privilege of getting to know and befriend people from all walks of life. In our ministry to English-speaking internationals, we met people from every continent (except Antarctica of course!). Not only did we meet them, we became friends with them. Some were of high socioeconomic status, some were university students, and others were adventurous modern-day nomads. But the ones who touched my heart the most were the refugees. I formed a deep friendship with a girl from Iran who had been forced to leave her home and family when she changed religions. One of Greg's good friends was a fierce-looking political refugee from Chechnya (at first I thought he looked like a James Bond villain, but he turned out to be a really nice guy). We also met refugees from places like Pakistan, Sierra Leone, and Syria. Each of these relationships helped to chip away, slowly but surely, at my hardened heart. Hearing their stories and becoming involved in their lives eventually moved me from a position of indifference and disdain to one of compassion and love.
My parents grew up in rural Texas. My mother lived in a small town in the windswept farmlands of the Texas panhandle, while my father was raised in a highly segregated East Texas town. In the social bubbles that defined rural America in the 1940s and '50s, they never spent time with anyone who wasn't white. Of course they saw people of different skin color, but it was as if they lived in completely different worlds. Rarely did people of color interact with white folks. And the racial differences were confined to African-Americans and Mexican-Americans. My dad said he never met a person from Asia until he was in medical school, where he had a class with a man from India.
Contrast my parents' upbringing with that of my daughters. They have been exposed to people from over 60 different countries in the past three years. Even before living in France, we were privy to a multicultural experience in our own neighborhood. Our kids grew up playing with a family of Bulgarian-American children who lived down the street. We also had German, Australian, Nigerian, and Scottish neighbors. The world is so much smaller and interconnected than it was just two generations ago. Our children accept "The Other" as their own; they have always known them, and they perceive few significant differences between people of other cultures and themselves. When they do notice the differences, they are much quicker to accept them.
I feel that my generation (Gen X) is a bridge generation: we don't have quite the open-mindedness of the millennials, yet we're slightly more accepting than our parents. I appreciate the honest conversations I've had recently with my parents. They have helped me comprehend the much different world they grew up in. Where I used to judge them for their political and social views which were quite different than mine, I now feel as if I understand. I can sense their fear of losing the values and norms that defined their upbringing. I can begin to see why they are shocked and saddened at the way the world is changing so rapidly. And I appreciate their graciousness at listening to the viewpoints that my children hold, and trying their best to relate to their worlds.
Yes, the world is changing. People of very different cultures are interacting with one another, whether we like it or not. The best thing we can do to gain understanding and acceptance is to try to walk in the other person's shoes... whether that shoe is worn by a refugee, an illegal immigrant, or even just a grandparent.
The other day I read an amazing passage in the wonderful book Love Does by Bob Goff. It's a long passage, but I'm going to quote it verbatim here because I need to have the full context in order to make my next point. So without requesting copyright permission from Mr. Goff (sorry, Bob), here goes:
"One of the ways I make things matter to me is to move from merely learning about something to finding a way to engage it on my own terms. For example, if someone asks what I think about capital punishment, instead of reciting the party line and parroting someone else's thoughts, I think of a teenager named Kevin in a prison in Uganda who had been accused of a capital crime. If the topic is same-sex attraction, I think of a dear friend of mine who is gay. Now instead of talking about an issue, I'm talking about a person, someone who matters to me. I think that Jesus wired us that way so that we'd remember. And it's not about just being politically correct, it's about being actually correct. We need to make our faith our very own love story." (Taken from Love Does, p. 201.)The problem I see with many people who have strongly held oppositional opinions on a hotbed topic like immigration (or capital punishment or homosexuality) is that they have never deeply interacted with an immigrant (or a criminal or a homosexual). They have never gotten to know that person as a friend. Their only frame of reference is a faceless category to whom they assign stereotypical attributes. And I'm not saying it's entirely their fault. Unlike Bob Goss, a lawyer who specializes in fighting injustices committed against children in Uganda, they've simply never had the opportunity to form friendships with African criminals. Unlike myself, they've never had the privilege of spending months and months living alongside religious and political refugees in a foreign country. Thanks to recent honest conversations I've had with my parents, I've recently realized that the generation gap plays a huge part in the gulf we're seeing now in political and social opinions.
My parents grew up in rural Texas. My mother lived in a small town in the windswept farmlands of the Texas panhandle, while my father was raised in a highly segregated East Texas town. In the social bubbles that defined rural America in the 1940s and '50s, they never spent time with anyone who wasn't white. Of course they saw people of different skin color, but it was as if they lived in completely different worlds. Rarely did people of color interact with white folks. And the racial differences were confined to African-Americans and Mexican-Americans. My dad said he never met a person from Asia until he was in medical school, where he had a class with a man from India.
Contrast my parents' upbringing with that of my daughters. They have been exposed to people from over 60 different countries in the past three years. Even before living in France, we were privy to a multicultural experience in our own neighborhood. Our kids grew up playing with a family of Bulgarian-American children who lived down the street. We also had German, Australian, Nigerian, and Scottish neighbors. The world is so much smaller and interconnected than it was just two generations ago. Our children accept "The Other" as their own; they have always known them, and they perceive few significant differences between people of other cultures and themselves. When they do notice the differences, they are much quicker to accept them.
I feel that my generation (Gen X) is a bridge generation: we don't have quite the open-mindedness of the millennials, yet we're slightly more accepting than our parents. I appreciate the honest conversations I've had recently with my parents. They have helped me comprehend the much different world they grew up in. Where I used to judge them for their political and social views which were quite different than mine, I now feel as if I understand. I can sense their fear of losing the values and norms that defined their upbringing. I can begin to see why they are shocked and saddened at the way the world is changing so rapidly. And I appreciate their graciousness at listening to the viewpoints that my children hold, and trying their best to relate to their worlds.
Yes, the world is changing. People of very different cultures are interacting with one another, whether we like it or not. The best thing we can do to gain understanding and acceptance is to try to walk in the other person's shoes... whether that shoe is worn by a refugee, an illegal immigrant, or even just a grandparent.
