differences

July 26, 2005

two weeks ago, i was in the pool doing my normal swimming deal. i get in the pool and immediately noticed there was some really weird stuff floating around in the water. it looked like it was pieces of tissue—it was white, tissue-like looking. at first, i thought it was isolated, maybe just one section of the pool. that thought quickly faded as i swam around the pool. it really was a strange sight. i couldn't help but think about it while i swam. after all, i was swimming through it.

there's two strokes i tend to use when i swim: breast stroke and back crawl. breast stroke is my most common stroke. as i swam, i tried to avoid the floating stuff. since i didn't know what it was, i didn't want to swim into it. foreign things have a way of making me feel very uncomfortable. so the best thing i knew to do was avoiding it (or at least trying my best to). swimming laps eventually became more like an avoidance game. interestingly enough, when i used back crawl, i swam normally. though i knew the floating stuff was there, i couldn't see it, so there wasn't anything i could do to avoid it. i just plowed right through it as if everything was fine.

it took me a while to understand what this all meant. near the end of my swim, it suddenly became clear: i was merely being human. whenever humans encounter things that are different, foreign, our natural tendency is to avoid it. after all, we don't know how it may affect us, and if there's a potentiality for harm, we definitely don't want that. that's exactly what i did when i was swimming using breast stroke.

the problem is, a lot of us treat people the same way. when we meet people who are different from us (whether that be personality, ethnicity, etc.), what goes through our minds? most likely we'll feel uncomfortable. it's much harder to work with people who are different. maybe we'll want to avoid them. differences also creates these subconscious divisions between us and them. between me and you. we all do this.

while this is our natural tendency, i do not believe it to be the right approach to people, especially if we proclaim to love Jesus. what we need to do, is yes, recognize that we're different, but not to let that realization get in the way of the way we treat each other. this is what happened when i swam using back crawl. i knew the floating stuff was still there, yet i still swam through it.

one thing that i've been thinking about over the past while, was how we differentiate people as Christians and non-Christians. i've learnt in psychology how we tend to have these in-group biases towards people in our social groups. we tend to favour the people in our group and not favour the people outside that group. this manifests itself in a variety of different ways: we may see ourselves in a better light, we may stereotype them, we might act unfavourably toward the, to name a few. the real problem lies in the fact that most of us are unaware of these biases. this is dangerous. these biases influence the way we think and act. think about it. do you think about Christians and non-Christians in the same way? do you act the same towards them? do you have the same expectations from them? do you love them the same? i think if we're honest, some of our answers to these questions would be no. and while there is nothing inherently wrong with that, it is something that we need to be mindful of.

what would happen if we treated everyone in the same way? if we didn't let race, culture, language, gender, personality get in the way of how we chose to live and love? things would change. lives would be touched. let's put aside our differences and strive to love the way love was meant to be: free and unconditional.

Posted by Leo Chan at July 26, 2005 4:07 PM