Welcoming the Visitors, Visiting with Folks who are Home

Charla and I are in another state. We have been here multiple times and have always enjoyed our travels. This time is a different time. We are travelers, which is not new, but our context is extraordinarily different.

I love traveling with her.  We have gone to interesting places and see interesting things, though most have been here in the USA. This weekend, I will walk into a world that is very new.  I am attending a stem cell training conference for physicians under the direction of Boston BioLife as a principal for Regenerative Outcomes. You may have heard or read about Doug Oliver. He has an extraordinary story.  By training I hold the doctorate in counseling psychology from the University of Mississippi. As a matter of choice and the heart, I am a family psychologist with interests that are as diverse as social justice, black farmers, poetry, ministry to couples and families, and the list could go on and on. I am a recovering academician. I still miss the academy, but thankfully I get to dabble still in some of those matters.

Be on the lookout on this page of a preliminary perspective on a bioethical translation model for working with patients in the stem cell world.  Why would that be of interest?  There are many, but a key one is justice. Unless things happen, only wealthy white people who can write a check will get the needed treatments.

So, it is within this context that this post is prompted.  It happened at breakfast in the restaurant.  Charla and I were hungry. We went to the same restaurant that we were at last night.  This morning, there was a different wait staff. The young woman who served us was obviously a Muslim. She wore her hijab. The irony was biting as we engaged her, or rather, she us, with the newsfeed over in the background showed scenario after scenario and quote after quote from today's political scene as we ordered breakfast. 

She is from another country. She wears clothing unique to her religion. She has been here several years. She became a US citizen two or three years ago.  She left family in her country of origin, and she has a few family members and a few friends in the states.

In ways that only she can do, Charla engaged her in conversation about what it is like for her in America.  She was surprisingly vulnerable as she shared around the fringes of the mistreatment she had received. It broke our hearts, both Charla and me.

We value engaging in differences. Those things make the world more interesting.  We attempt to care as best we can despite our frail human selves others around us.  Human to human, person to person, and the two of us older humans and she a younger human, to hear of her mistreatment was sad and painful.  We encouraged her to consider "what is the matter with you that you need to treat me this way," rather than accepting flaws within her.  She commented about one theological point from her religion and how God may say X, Y, or Z, but that she chooses to accept and not to judge.

So, here we are, readers of these pitiful words, in a world where philosophies and ideologies collide. No doubt about that.  In those moments of collision, we are still people, we can still offer grace, and that, I think, is what the Man from Nazareth would expect.  After all, that is what He did.