Dealing With DiversitySample

My daughter was six years old when she came barreling home from school one day with a very important discovery for my husband and me: “Mommy! Did you know that it if wasn’t for Dr. Martin Luther King, you and daddy wouldn’t have been able to get married? Then me, Zach and Caleb wouldn’t be here. He made our family possible!”

It was January and her class was learning about Dr. King – the timeless “I Have a Dream” speech, his life and legacy. I assume her teacher shared that Dr. King worked and preached toward racial equality and reconciliation. Since my husband and I don’t share the same skin color, my daughter, in her own innocent way, determined that without Dr. King’s work, we would not have been permitted to get married and have children.

Wow! What a profound thought for a six-year-old! As I go through life loving my husband, the differences in our nationalities and races don’t often come up. But that day, I began to wonder if I might be missing something. My daughter’s revelation caused me to look around at our neighborhood, her school, and our church to see if there were underlying things making our differences more prominent to our kids. 

As mommies, our job is to take the simple statements from those innocent mouths and decode them into larger lessons, relate them to spiritual truths, and allow God to unearth our own hidden heart conditions, right? 

What do we do, though, when the issue is racism? I care deeply about this issue and want to share with my children that “I have a dream” too. I’m right there with Dr. King. But 55 years after his famous speech, our society is still struggling to attain that dream. And as a young, married, working mom living in a middle class, primarily white neighborhood, I sometimes don’t feel qualified to comment on the subject of racism. 

PRAYER: Lord, please examine my heart. Root out the racism hiding there. Forgive me and help me to see and value others as You do.