Compare and Contrast
Princess Gail and I moved from Toledo, Ohio down here to Winston-Salem, North Carolina a little over a year ago. North to South. It has been a fun sort of culture shock! I find it interesting how in the same country, people can be so very different. The pace of life is different. The accents, inflections, tones, and phrases of our English language are different. The way people treat each other is different. The music, art, and even the view of history are different. Gail and I should stand out like sore thumbs. Ha!, maybe we do! But you wouldn’t know it. Everywhere we go, we have felt the warm welcome of “Southern Hospitality.” We don’t really fit in yet. We may as well have “northerner” tattooed on our foreheads. Yet we feel accepted… just the way we are!
It took a while, but I think I figured out why we are treated so nicely. It was a slap-my-forehead-duh moment. It’s not about the things that make us different! It’s about the things that make us the same!
We all are born, grow, and learn. We all work and play. We all sing and dance. We all love and are loved. We all are students and teachers. We all make mistakes, we grow some more, we are forgiven and we forgive. We all suffer, pay the taxman, and we die. There are so many things that bind us all together as human beings. It is so easy to understand that there are variations to these things, but that in their essence, they are human things, common to us all. Common. Communion. Community. Peace!
I will look for those things in people that make us the same!
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