I can remember searching the room, looking for my sweet girls’ faces after church one Sunday. When I finally found them in the crowd of children, they were happily playing with new friends they had made, oblivious to the fact that I had been looking for them.
The church we had started attending was a predominately Asian America church community, and I was struck that day by how normal it was for my girls to be the minority in most settings they found themselves in. Their school experience had been predominately among Latino children, and their church experience had been among mostly Asian American families. My children are actually biracial, with both white and Latino heritage. When my oldest daughter Anna started kindergarten, she used to have children in her class touch her sandy blonde hair as if it was exotic. In their short little lives, my girls had almost always been the different ones.
I have loved this about our family.
I’ve always wanted to raise my children in ethnically diverse settings, where they would build relationships across ethnic lines in ways that would give them a fuller picture of the image of God across cultures.
I mean, they themselves are the embodiment of two different cultural worlds with my husband being White and me being Mexican-American. They live in between two different worldviews and are shaped by them both in numerous ways. They understand God and his relationship with us through these two contexts, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
But after the most recent events, like the shooting in Charleston, I’ve had to catch my breath and ask myself the sobering question: am I also raising my children to be people who are fighters against injustice wherever it is found? The ugliness of racism that still floods much of our society today has been so blatantly on national display over the last 18 months. In the Charleston incident, nine African American brothers and sisters have been killed for no other reason than the color of their skin.
This is our world.
So I have to ask myself, what am I doing to be a part of an alternative story in our country through how I parent my children?
This year I’ve read and wept my way through books like The New Jim Crow. I’ve spent time listening to my black colleagues and friends share their stories of struggle in the midst of racist systems and people. I have thrown my voice in on the side of the “Black Lives Matter” movement. But, really, this has felt so insufficient. I keep asking myself for more.
As I’ve been wrestling through this, I’ve often been drawn to the words from Ephesians 2, that Jesus has torn down the dividing wall of hostility creating in himself a new humanity.
A new humanity that doesn’t erase our ethnic differences, but instead, unites us through the death and resurrection of Christ.
So, I will keep living into these cross-cultural relationships with my children, and I will keep teaching my girls to use their voices for the dignity of others. We are still on the journey together, but I am not content staying still.
My prayer is that my kids and my family will be a sign of the beautiful kingdom coming, where the wolf will one day dwell with the lamb. May we all be a sign of this as the community of faith, even if it means just starting with the question: What are we doing to tell a different story?
Photo credit: Ned Horton, Horton Web Design
Originally Published 10/9/2015
