There Are No Races...

It is true.  There are no races.  There is not black, white, yellow, brown or red.  There is not Asian, African, American or Arab.  There is not short, tall, fat, skinny or pretty.  There are no races.

Well, Dad didn't really teach me this with these exact words but he taught it with his life and with our life.  Our street had many colors, bloodlines, past countries of origin and types of people but to me it was just people.  I did not see color or size but just people.  He did not point out that there were not different people.  He simply lived as if people were people.  He only taught us to celebrate the variety of people when we would err and slight a person based on "what their physical body was like" or "a very different personal attribute."  It is then with sterness and a positive spin that he would point us back to the fact that people were people and no different one from another, in essence.

Because of this, long before it was politically incorrect, I called my friends who had brown skin black and my friends who had cream colored skin white.  Interestingly, no one on my street ever got offended at each other.  It was okay to state that the brown kid was brown because he was and it really didn't matter.  The short kid was short. 

I have passed this on to my kids by living it and only guiding them when they begin to make a distinction.  I remember my daughter saying long ago, "I don't know why they call us white, we are cream. And black people aren't black their brown."  She got it - what does it matter?

There are no races.  There are no creeds.  We create that by trying to distinguish ourselves.  Americans should be greater than this -  it should be a melting pot but, when it all melts together, it becomes American, not "some defining word"-American. Our heritage becomes everyone's heritage.

There is not distinction good or bad based on any physical or other characteristic.  When we were young, we played kick the can under the streetlights with every other kid in the neighborhood while our parents wandered yard to yard having conversations and laughing.  We did not know we were different races or colors because we weren't.  We were the human race which was made up - by our assumption of life - of many varieties in many things.  My life is richer and my heritage includes the heritage of many other nations.  Thanks, Dad.

Wouldn't it be great if the church was raised too to know that there are no races?  There is no black-church or white-church or rich-church or...   We are the parents - what is it that we will model to the church of the next century?  Wouldn't God's Church be richer with the heritages of all his believers mixed together instead of divided?  Who told us that they were different?

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[Rusty]

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