I think a little balance is in order, for the children’s sake.ĭoes that mean that I’m swinging to the other side to say that God only uses black and brown people? Just like it doesn’t matter that the images nearly everywhere else all over the world, including every store, museum, movie, book, greeting card, postcard, candle, magnet, and anything else you can think of shows every person, angel, or Biblical image as white. And if there are going to be images, my kids need to see – not just hear – that they belong in God’s kingdom.Īnd if the images don’t matter, then it won’t matter if a bunch of the images in my home have brown skin. What I do know is that it is unrealistic to say that there won’t be any images in our earthly lives. There is an argument that darker images are likely more realistic in many cases, but how dark? And with what features? I certainly am not about to open that can of worms because I have no idea. I obviously wasn’t going to have him walking around feeling like God uses only white people for His work, so in addition to verbally correcting him with the words below, I made more of a point to put images of brown-skinned Biblical figures in front of my children on a very regular basis. My premise: When a mixture is the norm, the differences become less of a thing. He understood the Truth, but the images were tripping him up, so I could either allow him to embrace the myth of all-white angels and other religious figures, or I could flood his mind with other images to help dilute the water (or milk, haha). Ultimately, I decided that the one-sided societal images he was seeing were making him feel as though there are distinctions in God’s kingdom. There will no longer be any curse and the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and His bond-servants will serve Him they will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads. And there will no longer be any night and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them and they will reign forever and ever. I wanted to take race off the table completely, but ignoring the ideas he picked up from the earthly images he’d seen wasn’t going to do that. I needed to correct his misplaced beliefs without giving power to the idea that there will be any type of racial consideration in Heaven. Given this, I felt stuck as I tried to navigate this minefield. There will be one culture, and that is God’s culture. I strongly believe that our experiences in Heaven will transcend race, ethnicity, skin color, etc. But as I began to unpack my son’s words and feelings, I got very tripped up along the way. In any case, I started off talking to them about angels and what really happens when people die. Where’s Ashton? (Some of you may be too young for that joke) because I have several similar stories about my kids’ observations on skin color, race, and ethnicity. I’ve now heard from enough people to think that perhaps I’m being punked or something. Whenever I share these crazy things that my kids say, I have people tell me that their kids have never said things like that. I seriously couldn’t believe he said that. “Poppy can’t be an angel! Angels are white!” When my daughter saw the new and improved photo she said, “Mama, you have your very own angel dad.” I was basking in the sweetness of her innocent thought when everything came to an abrupt halt with my son’s next words: They also witnessed my tears of joy when one of my best friends, who knew what the picture meant to me, gifted me with several copies of the photo that she had pieced back together, touched up, and recopied. I cried when I saw what he’d done, and my kids were there to witness it.
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