With our tongues we bless and curse

James 3:9-10
With it (our tongues) we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth comes blessing and cursing. My brothers these things ought not be.

I don't keep to many mementos from storage units I buy. I am not a sentimental person and tend to hang out to too much. But there are a couple of pictures I have kept on my desk for a couple of years.
They are school pictures from the 1950s. They are pictures of African American school pictures. This is before segregation. I wonder what happened to these kids, I wonder what life they lived?

I get fired up on occasion and the way we treat other people really irks me. I was listen to a friend talk last night and her daughter who has autism was speaking about her daughter. Some well meaning person came up to the family and said I am praying for your daughter to be healed. Her daughter within hearing distance said I am not broken.

Minorities, special need people, anyone not fitting into the social norm why do we generally curse and chastise them? Why are we so concerned about having different people fit into our culture?

I have just started reading Fear and What follows "the violant education of a Christian racist" by Tim Parrish, very interesting read. A true strory set in the south during the 1950s. I have asked myself what would my response have been if I had been in that setting. With the majority of southern Christianity affirming racism would I have had the guts to do what is right or would I have believed what was being preached and truly questioned it?

If the whole world looked, thought, and acted the same then we could be pretty certain God was exactly like us. Of course it isn't that way.

So if God created this class of African American students, my friends daughter, Kyle and every other different person perfectly, why don't I see them the same way?

Why does my first response be to look at people through my lense and think if they just did this, and acted this way then life would work.

It looks different when we connect with people in areas of weakness rather than strength. Last night we were in the county jail, and I was worried for my friend Art to speak. There were a lot of young men, some of who I knew and I thought they are going to raze, and not listen to him. They are going to be disrespectful and this is going to be a bad experience. It didn't turn out that way at all.

The reason it didn't was because Art spoke from a place of weakness. He spoke about his life, imperfections and a lot of the trouble he did and had gone through as a young man. It was so quiet in that room as he spoke. This was after all sorts of shenagans happened as they all came in.

As I was observing the young men were engaged, they had probably been cursed for much of their lives. They had been ridiculed, they had been beaten down, but here was Art and he was blessing them. He was giving them hope, he was giving a tangible story and person to see.

With out tongues we bless and we curse. How easy it is for us to curse everyone and everything wrong. With the week of Thanksgiving how am I blessing people? How am I using my tongue to build up? Not condemning, not asking how can I fix your brokenness (maybe they aren't broke) but rather how can we learn from each other to be the people God created us to be.