Acceptance

There is an incident that is forever impressed in my memory.  It is not a good memory.  As a matter of fact, it has left somewhat of a painful scar.  I think of it often.  I find it helpful to remember, because it keeps me grounded where I need to be in terms of how I feel about other people.

The incident happened, as an event, where I was an onlooker with about 200 other kids my age.  I was about 14 years old at the time.  Every afternoon in the summer all of the kids from the community gathered at the local outside pool for a swim.

On the particular day of the incident two new boys showed up.  They were brothers, recently adopted into a family in town.  They were not from our community, but came from a neighboring city.  They were both teenagers.

They were black.  It's sad to say but for that reason alone the incident happened that day.  A number of the local white boys surrounded the two black teens and pounded the living daylights out of them.  The reason: they dared to threaten to contaminate our pool.

That incident is forever impressed upon my memory.  I confess that I was ignorant of any type of response during that actual event; mainly because I had never encountered a black person so closely before.  I grew up in a predominately white community where the prevailing view was the same: black people were thought of as being sub-human.  I neither accepted or rejected that concept; I was just ignorant of any other point of view.

Ignorance is a learned behavior.  Two newly born infants - one black and the other white - laying side by side in the nursery have absolutely no prejudices toward each other.  Instead, prejudice happens through the example of parents and other adults, who greatly influence the formed opinions of children.

It wasn't until I became an adult and got away from the ignorance of my local culture that I began to learn the true meaning of acceptance.  It is based on a few common denominators which should keeps us all grounded in unity as a human race.

First of all, we are all created by the same Creator who is "no respector of men".  Galatians 3:28 says, "Their is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one is Christ."  In other words, God did not create some to be more special to Him than others.

Secondly, and this is a great common denominator of us all, we are all sinners.  We all have this defect in common.  Sin causes God through His saving grace to be color-blind toward all humanity.  He doesn't see the color of our skin.  It is not the color of our skin that we need to be saved from.  It is our sin.

The above incident is forever impressed upon my memory.  I am sadden by what I now know and believe; in that at the time I responded not one way or the other, but simply remained unresponsive to the situation.  If I had known then what I know now I might have spoken out against the beating on those two young black boys.

Acceptance is such an important Core Value for the church.  I am convinced that we are not very good at it on so many different levels.  This is an issue for the church that can be approached from so many different angles.  For now though, let us simply practice acceptance in all of our relationships with others.  No matter what, accept one another, just as Christ has accepted you.

-Pastor Leo