Since being in Africa, the Lord has taken me on a journey of what racism, discrimination and prejudice look like not only in my own life but in America also. I would say I come from a pretty diverse area of America, being from the south. My high school was pretty diverse. But even still, I’ve grown up experiencing prejudice and discrimination in my family and friends. I didn’t realize how it affected me and the way I see the world until I came to Africa. I am going to be talking about my personal experience over the last couple weeks and what the Lord has done in my life in regards to race. My prayer with sharing this testimony is that the Lord would speak to someone through it that may need to hear these things!
This journey started for me when we were walking to the Youth for Christ center here in Mochudi, Botswana. The Lord convicted me of not seeing people of color the way He sees them. I know I am not racist, I love all people and believe we all have a seat at the same table. But I would come to learn I was carrying a prejudice passed down from family and friends that I didn’t even know I had.
Coming to Africa, this is not something I thought I would struggle with. But the Lord has shown me how I carry a stereotype for people of color that I don’t know personally. I judge them based on the way they dress, the way they talk and how they act. I also do the same thing with people at home who aren’t of color but that’s a different story. This is a really hard thing to admit so please have grace for me. Around the same time the Lord convicted me, I started listening to a sermon series from a church called Reality San Francisco(I love listening to their sermons). This sermon series is on the topic of racism: what it is, how to identify it in the church, and how to disrupt it. I learned A LOT from this series, specifically the sermon titled “Disrupting Racism”. If you want to listen to it, I will include a link here. The sermons taught me that based on where and how I grew up, I had a prejudice without really knowing it. I asked the Lord to change my heart on this. I didn’t want to see people this way, I wanted to see all people how He sees them.
My favorite movie is Remember the Titans. It has been for a very long time! Anytime someone asks me what my favorite movie is, that is my answer. It’s a movie I could watch over and over again. I watched it last week (after listening to the Disrupting Racism sermon) for the first time in a long time. For the first time, I felt the full weight of that movie. I cried almost the whole movie because I finally saw it for what it was. I had never felt the weight of racism and discrimination like that before. This was the point when the Lord changed my heart. I saw with new eyes, His eyes.
The next day we went into Gaborone, which is the capitol city of Botswana, to do hospital visits and tutoring sessions with high school students. I honestly cannot describe in enough words the difference I felt. Being in the hospital meeting kids and their parents and praying healing over them, I was a different person because of how the Lord changed my heart. I saw the families for who they were, sons and daughters of God needing prayer, as we all do. I see how we are different but I have learned that it is something to celebrate. I was able to step into what the Lord was asking me to do that day because I saw the people I was serving as He sees them.
This is what the Lord does when you give Him the space and time. When you ask Him to make you more like Jesus, which I do every day, He will uproot things in your life that make you less like Jesus and change you to further reflect Christ. Ah, Thank you Lord that when I am ever changing, You are never changing!
If you would like to talk more about what the Lord has done in me or through me, feel free to message me on any social media platform or email me! If you don’t have my info and need it, comment down below! Thank you for reading this and I am praying for you!
God bless,
Bess
