Being in Africa, I started thinking about how amazing the Creator really is. Not only is the animal kingdom stunningly diverse and magnificent, but the people we meet here are as well. The majority of those who are hosting us are darked skinned. There are people groups from Egypt, Sub-Saharan Africa, Seychelle Islands and Madagascar. They are kind, smart, warm, welcoming, and charming. Watching them walking and working in the sun, I started thinking about the genius of natural design. Because the sun rarely gets filtered by clouds, it is intense and piecing. The Designer created skin with higher levels of the pigment, melanin, that makes skin darker as a protective factor for the people who live close to the Equator.
I was stationed and lived in Germany as an Air Force nurse. I noted that Germans are mostly light skinned. What a contrast. There is so much intelligence in this. The sun in Germany is rare and the northern sky is cloudy, winter is long, damp, and brutal. The people groups that are indigenous to this area do not need to be protected from the intensity of the sun. Their skin, therefore, is light, not peppered with large amounts of the protective pigment. What is the point?
In this dangerous time of racial division, I am reminded of the lunacy of it all. We are all members of the human family and the color of our skin serves a purpose of protection and wonder. What a wonderful thing to see regarding the intelligence of creation!
What can we do about racial and more recently, religious division? We can and we must discover the condition of the human family to increase our appreciation of what unites us. As I travel the world, I am convinced that moms around the globe seek to protect and care for their children. Children across continents cry when they are hungry or tired. They are curious and captivated with color, toys, balls, and trinkets. People globally are moved by music, laugh at something funny and are sad when they are lonely, frustrated, stressed, left out, bullied, or disappointed. All of us need food, water, shelter, rest, safety, security, belonging, acceptance, friends, purpose, companionship, love, kindness, support, and respect.
To heal, we need to be intentional, moving toward knowing one another, learning likes, dislikes, hopes, hobbies, hurts, disappointments, dreams, family and cultural history, food preferences, gifts, talents, passions, viewpoints, personalities, love languages and character traits. To discover these things, we need to develop healthy relationships with those who, perhaps, appear and worship different from us. Every individual has a story and, many times, are fighting great challenges. Case in point, a gentleman who was on the subway with his three children was oblivious to the children misbehaving and bothering the other passengers. Finally, a disgruntled passenger spoke up and chastised the father for allowing his children to run wild. As if in a trance, he looked up and apologized saying, “I am so sorry, we just came from their mother’s funeral.” This story illustrates how we don’t know what we don’t know.
Let us make an intentional effort to break bread together, host people in our homes, worship together, discover, be curious, find out the story of individuals we meet while being caring and kind. If we do that our differences will unite us in the global human family. joneenmac@gmail.com