Courage and Reconciliation, it's Complicated

It is complicated to explain what it is like to live in one culture when you are from another culture. Not a short term trip or an extended vacation can compare to this experience. Everything short of the air you breathe is different from the existence you are experiencing. In addition to the challenges of the many differences, there are the challenges of similarity. If you are similar enough to the world you are in, the majority group desires to simply integrate you (your differences are not that big of a deal to the new community and they prefer you minimize the differences) into their community and forget or erase who you are individually or where you came from . The food you ate, music you listened to, language that you spoke- very few, if any of your familiarities exist in this new reality. The new community desires to maintain a sort of blindness to the differences and ultimately requires compliance to the belief that those differences matter very little. There is a love between you and the new community. They not only desperately want to be your friend but also welcome others from your old community to let go of their lives and join you in your new existence. Your old world would love to join in but the path from one existence to another is not easy. Some readers are now completely confused, but for those still trying to understand this, it is not two opposite worlds like darkness and light or Christian and Atheist. This is a difference inside a similarity. For example, there are people - then there are vegetarians. Both are still human but some prefer life suffering aimlessly without bacon. Why? I couldn't tell you, but they do! Using the faith example might be easier to understand. You have two Christians. They both believe in Jesus. They both hold to the same tenants of the faith. But they are from different worlds and it's hard to get one, or maybe both of them to understand that. It might surface at weird times. Like say, two believers face the reality that although they are one in Christ, their Christianity did not remove the fact that one likes blueberry ice cream and the other has never had blueberry ice cream. Better said, the other does not know if ice cream even exists and is concerned ice cream, if it does exist might be sin even if it is edible! As a Christian, as a person of color, and as a foodie, it's sometimes complicated to understand and believe that in Christ there is no slave or free but that we are one in Christ (Galatians 3, Colossians 3). This is one hundred percent true. It is also one hundred percent true that people have lived in different worlds and even with Christ, they might not understand the complexities of each other (1 Corinthians 8). While working on my undergrad degree I was employed with very large national company. One of the men I worked with had a job that required him to drive at different times of day. He always seemed nervous at dusk, but one day he explained. He had served in the military and did a tour in vietnam. He remembered that at dusk because of the bombardment weapons and deforestation techniques there was a residual. At dusk, the mixing of chemicals caused a strange mist, an amber light in the sunset. The street lights outside our offices at dusk, produced a similar looking kind of light for about 15 min each night when they turned on. It was not the same thing, but it really freaked him out. Irrational? Not to him! We were close, we were in community together. We were friends, men, and co-workers. We had many similarities. But there were still some things in our unique stories that made understanding each other difficult, even inside our similarities. I wasn't allowed to ignore his differences. I could insist we were the same, even unified, but those differences mattered. I could choose to be "difference blind" when it came to driving off property at dusk. "We are so similar, your differences really don't matter, I don't even see them" I could say. Driving off property at dusk? He couldn't do it- and it was hard for me, without a full explanation to understand why. Even though I never understood his fear, it was real. Apparently the chemicals that made the strange misty light in Vietnam, many years before we even met had entered his blood stream and sadly took his life some months after he shared that fear of dusk explanation with me. As a person of color with a deep faith in Christ, I love that I am the same as other believers in Christ, everywhere. I also accept that especially in America and among other fellow conservative believers, the life I live as a man of color creates a flavoring that is different. The entire world is talking about getting along. Unity is well regarded and in the evangelical circle, reconciliation is the word of the day. Yet this requires courage. For a long time, as a minority I thought it was I who required courage. Courage to forget that I too was fearfully and wonderfully made. Courage to forget that the food I ate and the music I listened to had a value that was neither secular nor sacred but had a value nonetheless. Yet I see that my courage is irrelevant. The one needing courage is whoever is the majority of anything. That person and group needs courage to stop, look and listen. They need courage to consider that ice cream might really exist and that they could even want to find out more about it. They might even decide that blueberry ice cream is worth a try.

Written by Rev. Gregory Dyson, MSOL

Pastor, First Baptist Church of London, OH. Greg is also the Director of Intercultural Leadership at Cedarville University. He is a Graduate of Word of Life Bible Institute, Cedarville University and Cairn University.