For most of my adult life, I purchased eggs by the dozen from my local grocery store. Every carton contained uniform white eggs of exactly the same size. I never thought about the irony of this image until we began raising our own chickens. We purposefully bought a variety of chicks so we could enjoy the beauty of the different breeds. Our Comets have bronze feathers and the Australopes’ are jet black. Fred, our Amerucana rooster was various shades of gold with turquoise tailfeathers. He was gorgeous! But our hens’ colorful eggs, were the most unexpected surprise. They are every imaginable shade of brown and some are even pink and blue. Only one of our chickens lays white eggs. What I once expected as the norm, now seems a little dull and boring.
When I was a child, I grew up in a small, farming community in Indiana. Everyone I knew was uniformly white and most were Christian. Occasionally, I met someone different than myself but most of my days I spent with people who looked just like me. The first African American moved in our town when I was in middle school. I remember one family in particular that was visibly upset by this and decided to send their children to another school. My friends and I thought this was ridiculous. We were ready for some diversity in our world and just didn’t understand the attitude of these adults.
You see, kids are not naturally prejudiced. Most are just curious when they see someone who looks different than themselves. I remember my first trip to Haiti in 2000. When we arrived for clinic, the first thing the children wanted to do was to touch my white skin. I was a curiosity to them until they reached out to feel my arm. Even though my color was different, the smooth warmth of my skin was the same as theirs. Through the act of touch, we connected in a way that helped dissipate any fear or misunderstanding.
We build a bond of trust every time we allow this kind of connection to happen. However, this rarely occurs by chance. People tend to congregate culturally, racially and economically with others like themselves. Our churches follow this same trend. To confront this natural segregation, we must purposefully cross borders to connect with others who are different then ourselves. Only by welcoming the stranger and offering them the hand of friendship, will the walls of isolation and prejudice ever fall.
The root of the word “prejudice” is “prejudge.” Isn’t that what happens in our minds? We prejudge the person who looks different than ourselves by our past experience or more commonly, by what others told us to believe about them. Our human eyes see their exterior but God sees the inner person. We are beloved children created in His image, uniquely beautiful in our own way. Like the multicolored eggs we collect from our hens, we look different. Yet when our minds crack open to new understanding, we realize what lies inside is the same.
As a child, my experience was limited. I was blind to the variety of people living outside my isolated existance. However, as an adult, my work offers me the opportunity to meet a grand diversity of patients from all over the world. We welcome every creed, culture and color in our clinic. This experience calls me to see with new eyes the beauty of those around me. God’s children, made in His image, walk into our exam rooms everyday. With each encounter, the patient and I have a choice to leave old attitudes at the door and start anew. Together, we tear down the walls of prejudice by building bonds of trust… one person at a time.
