I never was good at coloring inside the lines...

Well, since my med school application is nearing completion and my essays have been sent out to the editing committee, I feel less guilty for trying to get some of my life thoughts in writing. It turns out that even when I'm in the states, I still manage to see new things and think thoughts that are new to me (though I'm not sure I can do anything but recycle the thoughts of others).

Anyways, it's time for a story or two, and hopefully more to come.

This summer I have a research internship in Baltimore, Maryland and, through a series of providential events, am living with a emergency physician on the north side of town. Since my summer training has started for this coming cross country season, one of the first orders of business was to find good running routes. So, the first week or two I spent trying different roads and directions around my house, and I quickly learning that Northern Parkway was made for cars and not runners, that the roads in baltimore don't follow any rhyme or reason, and that I may be running a whole summer of out and back type runs instead of the much more pleasing loops.

On one of my first Saturdays in Baltimore, I opted to run through the neighborhood south of my house. There was a park somewhere in that general direction, so I figured I could give it a try. After about a mile of running I found myself running through the ghetto, the hood, or whatever you want to call it; it was a poor neighborhood with a primarily African American population. In fact, I was the only white person I saw for about 10 miles of that run.

Running through that neighborhood didn't bother me at first, it wasn't much more to me than another road that happened to have very little traffic. However, it became obvious rather quickly that I was more than a little out of place. Nearly everyone I passed made a comment, some surprised, some negative, some hostile. At one point, while running past a group of high schoolers, I heard one of them say, “alright, I got him,” and proceed to run at me as if he was going to jump me, trying to get some sort of reaction out of me.

I managed to not react, even made some comment clever enough to make the group laugh, but I couldn't help but wonder at what segregations and stereotypes have prevailed and grown to the point that a young black man knows he can scare most white people in his neighborhood just by pretending to be a thug.

The thing about segregation and inequality is that without seeking it out, I never seem to notice it. As I run through the streets of Baltimore, I often pass from one socioeconomic class to the next, and find it rather strange. But if I actually stop to think about it, the same communities exist in Grand Rapids, the same ethnic and racial divides exist on my beloved Midwest streets. I just fail to notice them as I spend my life in my own parts of the city, only venturing into other parts to be part of an ever so sacrificial visit to a soup kitchen or to take a field trip for a college course on immigration. Seldom do I actually enter into the community or culture of a group of people unlike myself, nor do opportunities to do so readily present themselves, neither in Grand Rapids or Baltimore.

Walking back to my car one night after work, I was going around the backside of a church diocese headquarters, and I passed by two meeting rooms with big glass windows. Both rooms had meetings in process, with the first room containing exclusively white clergy, and the second room containing exclusively black clergy. I kept walking by, hoping that what my eyes were seeing was a misunderstanding and not a reality.

Paul talks a lot about equality and not showing favoritism, with the body in Christ being neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free. Revelation talks about every tribe and tongue joining together in the new heaven and earth in worship of our King, and Acts gives a beautiful foreshadowing of this in the story of Pentecost, as each heard the gospel spoken in their own language through the unifying work of the Holy Spirit. Yet as we look at our churches, we still hold our meetings in our own styles with our own social class, we still hold separate meetings for the white church and the black church of the diocese, and if we honestly look at ourselves, we even have managed to create churches with people that are in the same sort of salary range as us.

As people we like to be around others that are similar to us, and to some level that tendency makes sense, as Paul urges us to be like minded as well as to separate ourselves from the world. Unfortunately, in the process of doing so, we have added a whole lot of criteria for like mindedness, like political ideals and vacation destinations.

It seems so simple; treat even those that are different than yourself with the love that you would desire to be treated with. Comprehend that the world is bigger than what you know or have experienced, that culture different than your own is not automatically worse (or better). Accept like Christ accepted you, for Christ's sake. And yet as many times as I tell myself this, I still do not find this to be my immediate thought or response as the next homeless man comes asking me for just 80 cents.

But we must continue to strive for the unity that Christ calls us to, longs for, and prays that we may have. Not the unity that we find when we join the country club down the street, but the unity that brings together every nation, tribe, people, and language, people that smell different than each other, that talk different, that raise their children different than each other. People that may have never once looked at each other with kindness in their eyes unless Christ had done so for them, and have since begun crying out, and will continue to do so through eternity, “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”

Our attempts at unity will fall short. But as the side bar next to this post has already mentioned, “It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.”