What do you do when you don’t fit in? How do you respond when the place, home, and land you have grown up in rejects you? What are you supposed to feel when stares, whispers, and the news constantly reminds you that you are still not enough of a person to some? Where do you go?
I’m a mix. A mutt is the actual term I was called the majority of my life. A honey latte of a person. White and Brown. Mexican and White. Half and half. And to every community I’ve been a part of, a half too little (or too much) to count. I don’t know Spanish and my mom is white so I can’t possibly be Mexican. I’m too dark and my features are too different to be considered white.
So I grew up in a limbo of culture and acceptance. I constantly had to defend both parts of my make-up. I had to take classes in order to learn the history of the half of my culture I was never accepted in. I wanted so much to be welcomed into a history, culture, and community that is known for love and family. And yet, because my mother is white and my father is no where in my life, I stand on the outside looking in.
And yet, God still uses all things for the glory of His kingdom. My mother never limited love by race either. My two favorite dolls growing up were a white cabbage patch baby boy and a black cabbage patch little girl. I grew up seeing the value in all of God’s people and His ability to make hues of every color of skin imaginable. God used my mother to keep my heart soft and to put a special hurt inside of me that would continue throughout my life.
God has given me a heart that breaks for what breaks his. The widows, the orphans, the poor, and the downtrodden. The downtrodden to me are the people that are born and judged immediately. They are those that have to start halfway in the basement and work their way up because someone said they were defects because of their looks. They are entire groupings of people that turn on the news and see that their own country hates them.
I’m not black and because I’m not black, people think that I don’t understand the struggle and the pain that is felt. But oppression is oppression. Discrimination is discrimination. Rejection is rejection. My heart breaks when your heart breaks. The fear that is building in your gut is building in mine too. I’ve looked and planned ways out because I have learned what can happen when fear and prejudice win.
God knows that pain too. God feels that hurt as well.
We tend to forget in a white-saturated country that the savior of humankind was a colored man. He was a Jew, a Middle-Eastern man that worked in the sun. He didn’t sit in a building but let the sun saturate his already olive-painted skin.
He lived completely opposite of what so much of the authority and power today knows. He had no home. He had no stability. He was not handsome. He didn’t come from a good background. He rejected gaining power and instead chose love. He broke all of the cultural norms because they weren’t reflective of Heavens standards.
He talked to those society cast out. He received those that others turned their noses up to. He laughed and lived outside of the popular opinion and lived inside of God’s will. He gave hope to those that had been kicked down to the lowest level that could be thought up. He had no prejudices because of skin. Jesus was a part of painting the world’s people, so his love went from the palest of whites to the darkest of blacks.
He didn’t turn his back on either of them. So when I see that his creation still doesn’t get it, my heart breaks. It builds a righteous anger inside of my spirit that wants to scream out to the world to just be done with a power grab that is based on the amount of melanin in an organ. I want to exhort groups of people to understand and walk in forgiveness and exhort another group of people about the action that needs to come with repentance of wrongdoings.
I am about to step onto United States soil for the first time in 8 months, and a deep sadness is overwhelming me. A place that asks for God’s blessing but cannot even love a neighbor as one’s self. I’ve had to live my entire life on the fringe, and I hate the fact that there are little girls and boys that are being subjected to that still. Whispers and red tape shouldn’t still be a thing that parents have to protect and strengthen their kids against. And it definitely shouldn’t be gaining momentum like it is.
Why do we forget, on all sides, that Jesus is a colored man that loved and came for all men?
