Wednesday, August 18, 2010

How to fight...

My son was on the school bus one day this week and heard another kid call him a terrorist. Really? Why?  Because we lived in the Middle East for 18 months?  My first instinct was anger and fear…
  • Anger that my son was called a name
  • Anger that anyone could be so ignorant as to label someone as a terrorist simply because they spent time in the Middle East
  • Fear that my son might be hurt or bullied because of a decision we made to live overseas.
Some friends suggested trying homeschooling or (at least) getting him off that bus and driving him to school. I know these comments come from a spirit of love and protection (mixed with a little fear).

And the truth is that the boy on the bus was also speaking from a spirit of fear (where all bullying comes from, really)…but, we don’t fight fear with more fear.

We fight fear with Faith…
  • Faith in a God who is bigger.
  • Faith in a God who loves.
  • Faith in a God who hurts over our sin, not for his own sake, but for ours.
  • Faith in a God who wants nothing more than to pour his grace on us (and on that kid from the bus) so much so that it can’t help but overflow onto others.
  • Faith in a God who has a plan that is so much bigger than any of us, and could do it all himself, yet allows us to be a part of it.
And…

  • Faith in a God that will use my son, and me, and you in the lives of people who are filled with fear…to show them faith.

 

2 comments:

  1. good post. :) and how beautiful that he knows already what it is like to identify with the marginalized.

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  2. Excellent post. Americans tend to be very ethnocentric and lack the ability to understand other cultures.

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