…smile on your brother…

When you’ve been writing for as long as I have there aren’t many subjects that would be completely new, matter of fact none come to my mind right now. However it does give me a rich field in which to plow when my mind is in a quandary as it is now over all the things that are happening in this US of A and as I sat down to write a few moments ago I heard my mouth say, “Who are we?” I’m not sure if I was praying and asking God for clarity or if it was just frustration and actually trying to figure it all out. 

Several things come to mind, is prejudice new? You all know the answer to that. My parents married as the New Year was rolling in at midnight New Year’s Eve bringing 1942 into 1943. My dad being of full Armenian heritage married mother who was an eighteen year old girl whose heritage went back to ancestors coming to this country and landing on the East Coast and her blond hair and blue eyes, that had attracted my swarthy Armenian dad, came from, according to 23 and Me reports, her Irish and British background. My dad broke with the tradition of keeping the blood line “pure” by marrying a cousin when he married her so taking her back to Los Angeles with him as a newlywed she was not welcomed with open arms by the group as a whole. Thankfully the exception was his immediate family, his dad and mom who loved her from the start. The rest of the group called her an ‘Odar’ which means ‘outsider’. One of the older ladies said she had seven demons in her and one of the demons looked like a cow! When you quit laughing about that remember she was only eighteen and had led the life of a sheltered preacher’s daughter. That particular lady tried to devise a way to kill her and had people calling the house late at night asking my dad to come pray for them, he was also a preacher, so that mother would be left unprotected in the house and on one occasion had gotten in and was going to slit my mother’s ivory throat with a long knife. My dad had left and suddenly felt that he needed to return, he found that woman holding the knife in the bathroom waiting to attack my mother. The sliced throat would have excised the demons and daddy would have been “free of her spell”…

My dad made the decision to come back to the south where he was discriminated against because of his dark skin and the “Clark Gable” mustache he sported and was called many unsavory names which I won’t repeat here. That was passed down to this writer who experienced extreme prejudice from classmates… no need to recount all those stories, you get the drift.

So what I was wondering about all these people who are so perfect that they can decide they are ‘better than’ someone else, is why are they so bent on hating someone because of a different shade of skin, shape of the eye or texture of the hair? Who ARE these perfect people?

That is when I remembered an article I wrote a few years ago in which I said, “we were all just puppies at one time in our life”… puppies because I had seen on the news where a pack of dogs had attacked a child and that particular breed was being threatened by a ban against their whole breed!  It’s not the dog who was born an innocent pup but the people who breed them to be fighters and abuse them into being the monsters they become, or the baby that grows to be a Hitler, a James Earl Ray or any other person who has committed heinous deeds fault… they were born into the world the same as any saint you can name, so why? It’s the way they were raised by parents who are raising them the way they were raised and it goes on and on and what was the original reason???  Can you make a difference?

There is but one thing we can blame and all the variances that go into making a human a monster are embodied in it… 

James 1:13-15 Don’t let anyone under pressure to give in to evil say, “God is trying to trip me up.” God is impervious to evil, and puts evil in no one’s way. The temptation to give in to evil comes from us and only us. We have no one to blame but the leering, seducing flare-up of our own lust. Lust gets pregnant, and has a baby: sin! Sin grows up to adulthood and becomes a real killer.

It is SIN

Instead of becoming angry at each other and letting our opinions separate us from friends and family members let us use that energy to pray for our country, for every human that resides here no matter their origin and ask God to forgive our collective sin of hate, prejudice and unforgiveness.

John 3:16-18 “This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again. Anyone who trusts in him is acquitted; anyone who refuses to trust him has long since been under the death sentence without knowing it. And why? Because of that person’s failure to believe in the one-of-a-kind Son of God when introduced to him.