Sunday, November 11, 2007

Racial Diversity

I don't know what to write about racial diversity because the only diversity I really deal with is not all that evident to me. I don't treat anyone different because of the color of their skin. To me, we're all just people. I don't like it though, when I'll treat someone the same as I would any person and they take it to be offensive. It's like they're saying they want to be treated equally but really they want to be treated sensitively, which I believe is not the same. If I can say one thing to a white person and the same thing to a black person and the same thing to an asian person, I don't believe it should be taken differently, but they will all respond differently because of their backgrounds and experience, they shouldn't respond differently simply because of their race. I believe that each person should be treated the same as the next, as carefully and individually as you would treat any person, not based on their race. That may not make any sense, but that's what I think.

Global Vision Week

I didn't go to Beginnings this week, but I do know a lot about the global missions. This summer I was able to go to China on a three week mission trip with my church. It was the craziest most unusual missions trip I've been on. Most of the trips I've been on were about the people there, and how we would work for them and build them a church or a house or an outhouse, etc. But on my trip to China, we were there to make relationships. We ate with people, played basketball with them, talked with them in English to improve their English skills. We introduced them to our friend, who is a missionary there, and we opened a doorway for him to work through after we were gone. We were there simply to encourage the new believers and to keep their hopes up in Christ, give them a reason to keep going. Many Christians we met, had lost hope and wanted to give up because no one else they knew was a Christian, but we restored their hope in Christ, and isn't that what we are supposed to do as a body of Christ, encourage each other? So even though it wasn't the way I had expected the trip to go, or as other trips had gone, it was still God working through us to encourage our brothers and sisters around the world. =)

The Holocaust- Genocide

So I've heard many times about the holocaust and genocide, and have been to the museum of tolerance in both LA and in Germany. They are very impacting and very influential, but they never really sink in, even with hearing a person's own story. I've debated the issue in Model United Nations and have written resolutions on how to stop the issue, but it all just became an assignment rather than a passion or an interest to change. I know that this is ignorant and really not the way it should be, however, living in our skeptical generation has made me this way. Sadly the one thing that has impacted me the most, is an art piece that I went to in the holocaust museum in Germany. The entire museum was confusing and as soon as you went in you were disoriented with really, no sense of where you were. That frustrated me, so I didn't much enjoy the rest of the museum but then my friends took me to this one art piece that silenced me completely. It was the most impactful thing I've seen, and maybe that's just because I am more impacted by art than anything else. But it was this large Vshaped room. Completely white with high ceilings at the entrance and low ceilings at the back. It was well lit at the entrance and completely dark at the point of the V. In the side was this pool of metal that you were supposed to walk on, like it was the floor. Each metal piece was formed into a frowning face, and while you walked on them, they would clank together and echo in the rest of the room. It made me speechless because it was like all the people's screams just being trampled, millions and millions of screams just resonating, and nothing being done about it. I pray, but it is still not a passion of mine to change it. I do not agree with genocide, obviously the mass murdering of millions of people is not okay, but I feel that right now all I am called to do with it is pray, remember and pass on.