Not Like ME!

Charlie Peacock sang "We're a whole lot different, we're a whole lot, the same". Yup.

In "If I Leave This World Tomorrow" I often sing in the verse about having traveled all around the world "People are people wherever you go". Reality.

Yet some folks are so focused on self, their own comfort zone, what they've always thought of as "right", they have a tendency to suspect, worry and even fear someone "not like me". Truth, no?

And so concern for what feels safe, fear, even a rise in anger or even hatred gets cooked up like a rotten chili that boils over and stinks up the place. It comes from a heart and sure, an ignorance of "the other" whomever that other person or people group is and wherever they come from.

Thus issues about "the stranger" at core simply because they're strange to us, the distrust and dislike and uncomfortable truth of them breathing "my" air, taking "my space", maybe even taking my job or God forbid (He often doesn't) marrying "my daughter".

Oh I know, some professing Christians zip right to the Old Testament and quote verses about the people of God inter-marrying with the pagan nations surrounding them or living among them. The same people often ignore or willfully stay ignorant about the literal commands of the Old Testament where God repeatedly tells them how to treat the foreigners with grace, kindness, justice and even provisions...

The law-breaking politicians will of course play off of "the laws of the land" but it's obviously not law they're most concerned with seeing they conveniently ignore, subvert and change them -for their own benefit$- and such is history in these "United" States and plenty of other nations dear reader.

What to do?

GET SERIOUS about loving those not like you. Travel. Read -and not just sources you already agree with and often hold prejudice/bigotry/racism/xenophobia that already lines up with yours. Move beyond the pre-and causal Civil War (U.S.) mentality that continues to ball-and-chain people's hearts into "Either WE dominate or they do... and it ain't gonna be THEM".

What Jesus taught and lived by example (just study His attitude toward Samaritans for example) is too often left in the dust due to our own lack of faith and trust in God -and the core and self-serving desires that ignore and even bury His command to love our neighbor as our self -with ZERO comment on who they are or where they come from.

And as always, thanks for stopping by. -Glenn