The Weightier Things

Sometimes I am struck simultaneously by the beauty and pain of speaking truth into our world. Today is one of those days. I am deeply pained, moved to tears by some of the things that I learn about and yet also so alive and ready to work to change the status quo and speak true hope into creation. Last night I sort-of half watched this special on racial relations, a “where are we almost 50 years after the Civil Rights movement?” kind of thing. It was really alarming. The part that alarmed me the most was the part where they had little kids look at these two dolls, one white and one black. Other than their color, the dolls were basically identical. The kids were asked several questions about the dolls, like “which one is prettier?”-they would always point at the white doll. “Which one is bad?”-they pointed at the black one. There were other questions too…it nearly broke my heart to see them played out in the gestures of little ones. A really skewed view of the world depicted by kids, who looked like they were about five.

How do we speak change into these situations? Goodness knows they need change and the kind of change they need, I feel so certain, is not the kind of discussion that dominates in our culture. What breaks my heart is to think that some kids think that one is more beautiful than another, simply because of their skin color. What our culture needs, though, is not another special on how to be more tolerant or accepting of others (or even a black President); it needs a vast deeply moving renewal that will saturate its core and sweep its far reaches. This is the change I desire to see in our world, and this change is one that I want to be a part of (to a smaller scale than what my dreams hold at their utmost, but I’m willing to accept the proximate, always pushing towards the greater and loftier vision, though). It is a change that cannot become possible until the culture accepts that some are right and some are wrong, and that there is a moral basis for doing good in the world rooted in real, personal, and also communal belief.