Today is a day that will go down in history! I am excited that our nation has come to a point that we have felt free to elect a black man to the highest office of our nation. It is a day that I hope men like Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King, Jr. are looking down on our nation rejoicing in knowing that a small part of the fulfillment of "the dream" is now reality. Perhaps, somewhere in the great unknown, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth are hugging each other and praising God that, perhaps, we are closer to the understanding that the equality of humanity is not based upon skin pigmentation but upon the sacred image of God endowed by man's Creator. I believe that is great news for America...God wept for our future when we rejected the black man as our brother and passed laws that enslaved him and designated him as one with "no rights that any white man was bound to respect."
I remember the frustration in my mind as a little girl visiting a man in my home state of Texas. As he sat in the filthy, unkept house that he had provided for his family through the on-again, off-again jobs he had managed to acquire and lose in rapid succession, he told me that I needed to understand that "all black men are lazy and are only after our white women." History shows us that the ability to be lazy and a scoundrel is not dependent on one's skin color. I have known black men who were wretched and I have known white men who were wretched...when God looks at them he doesn't see a wretched black man or a wretched white men...He simply sees a wretched man in need of a Savior...and so should we.
But I also wonder if Douglas, Washington, King, Tubman, and Truth did not also weep as they saw the divided country that this man has been appointed to lead. We are fully aware that there were those who voted for Obama because he is a black man...is that any different than refusing to vote for him based on the color of his skin? Either way we are still judging a man by his color rather than by his character. We are still a divided nation as we continue to reap what was sown so many years ago - we sowed seeds of division, hatred, and bitterness and we will continue to reap it until we have fully repented as a nation of our continued refusal to see each human, - male or female, black or white, Asian or Hispanic, born or unborn - as a Creation of God Almighty and, therefore, worthy of respect, honor, dignity, and protection of law. We obviously are not at that point with our view of unborn babies, be they black, white, male or female. And our new president has sworn to make it easier to discriminate against these members of humanity based, not on their color, but on their residence: the womb. Nope, we're not at that place of full equality based solely on being an Image Bearer just yet.
Let's pray for our new president...God alone knows what the future holds for the nation that he is leading.
