Honestly?

I'm back. The good news about vacation is that I have a surplus of blog ideas. Topics include marriage (again), Star Wars, weird perspectives, and evolution/intelligent design. This plethora of topics is good for when I start getting sleep deprived again. (Side note: My creativity seems to go up when I start getting caught up on my sleep. Then I start not sleeping to fulfill my creative ideas. Then I start loosing sleep. Hrm.)

At the moment, I'm mostly reflecting on someone else's (a Christian, um "Ted") talking about how he views the world around him. I really appreciate his honesty, as I think it reflects a lot of how I tend to feel if I was really honest - at least at times. I'll cling to my pride by suggesting that sometimes I'm a bit more noble.

The context was that Ted and I were talking about how he was adjusting to a recent move. We got talk talking about the difficulty of loving your neighbor, and I thought he beautifully summarized a lot of fears and realities of being a Christian interacting with non-Christians. With permission, a paraphrased version is excerpted below.

[How are you enjoying your new home?]

Culture down here is different. Being masculine seems roughly equivalent to being a jerk with no emotions except anger, which helps one drink better. Feminism is a dirty word down here. Kids get pegged into very distinctive and hurtful gender roles. You either play football or you cheerlead as a kid. Appearance is the only thing that matters if you are a girl, how good you are at football is what matters if you a boy. And I'm talking about kids that are 10 and under. The word "nigger" is still in regular usage.

I don't drink, which is the main pastime down here. (The stats are something like 1 in 3 people down here is an alcoholic.) Of course, not wanting to explain that I don't drink due to medication to every single person I run across, I've been labeled as a teetotaller.

We don't have much in common. Its hard to become friends. Our value systems, and how we think about what is important in life, what we base our lives on, are so different. If we have faith, how we view it is very different.

I'm pretty isolated. I don't make friends that easily anyhow, and I'm in a place where I don't have a lot in common with most people. The circumstance is, that the other world is so foreign that I don't feel that I could ever understand it. It's like me speaking Chinese and you speaking English, without a translator available. Mostly I spend my time trying to explain to my kids why racial slurs aren't acceptable in my classroom, even if they are acceptable everywhere else, and even if, "But there aren't any black people in here!"

I'm actually scared of having too much in common with some people down here, because, frankly, I think they are racist, ignorant, and selfish, and if I am, I don't want to know. Much like I never wanted to think that I had anything in common with the kids I perceived as being "popular" in high school. If I could envision myself as being superior, then I wouldn't ever have to face any of my faults. Not the ones I didn't want to face, anyhow, like the fact that I was rude and abrasive.

[What's your model for how God is going to change people?]

I've tended to not think of it as my job, in the big picture, anyhow. I don't have the resources to change the community. I was talking with the associate pastor at church about this problem and basically, the answer is, "love them." I'm trying to figure out how to do better, because my natural, instinctive reaction is to fight them, which doesn't help anything.

One of my students last year said something that made me laugh. I give extra credit every once in awhile on tests and quizzes for being able to name people in history or something. I told them what the clue was, and one of my kids said, "It has to be someone who is gay, black, or Jewish, because Mr. Xavier only likes people who are gay, black, or Jewish." And after the laughter died, I realized that those were the groups of people I most regularly defended in the classroom. They didn't hear me defending *them*. They heard me defending these people who they had never met, who they were insulting out of habit.

I think in order to figure out what God's model for changing these people is, I'd need to know what God wants to change in what order. But I don't generally think of myself as the one cut out to do that.

That's what I can't get past. I can't look past all of the stuff that revolts me so much...Maybe even not because its "sin" but because it flies in the face of everything I personally value, even things that aren't sin issues... the lack of value placed on education, the lack of an interest in anything happening outside of the county, the lack of a recognition that there is a bigger world out there, and it matters. Frankly, those things are more visible to me than other issues, and they are easier to look at.

I'm selfish... their salvation doesn't necessarily help me feel any more at home here, any more connected. I'd like for something to happen to help that. I'd like it if the things that I saw here looked more familiar.