Different But One

In response to something I said a while back regarding the "Black Lives Matters" movement, an African-American individual I've known for some time told me that I'd never understand what it was like to be a black man in this country.  My response was that I agreed but that he would never understand what it was like to be this white man.

He and I come from the me generation but our color gave us different experiences.  He faced some hardships that I did not have to face, but I have faced loses that he has yet to face.  I don't know what it means to grow up in an inner city ghetto but he doesn't know what it's like to live in the country without electricity or indoor plumbing.

I didn't grow up having to depend on government assistance.  He didn't have to hoe a garden, wring chicken necks and chop wood for survival.  I'll never quite understand black life in the hood; he'll never quite understand white life in the woods.

I will never know what it's like to sit in an over-crowded class in an under-funded school with an over-worked and frazzled teacher trying her best under some of the worst conditions.  He will never know what it is like to sit in a one-room school with one overwhelmed teacher trying to teach eight separate grades at one time without even the convenience of an indoor toilet.

The simple fact was that both of us had our own difficulties and challenges that the other will never quite understand.  It would be easy to say that one or the other had an advantage.  But the truth is that we both had some advantages and disadvantages not shared by the other.  His life was difficult in ways I'll never understand and mine was equally a mystery to him.

But what we share in common is a Savior that fully understands us both, "who has been tempted in every way, just as we are —yet he did not sin" (Heb 4:15).  We both serve a God who invites us to approach his "throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need" (v. 16).

Our color and our culture and our childhood do not provide common ground upon which we can stand but our common commitment to the Christ provides a rock foundation upon which we both can and will stand for eternity in a oneness of spirit that the world can never truly understand.  Jus' Say'n.