Friends, Angels, Perspectives and Overcoming my Prejudices

Let love of the brethren continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember the prisoners, as though in prison with them, and those who are ill-treated, since you yourselves also are in the body.

Hebrews 12:1-3.

For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.  There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.

Galatians 3:27-29

A large obstacle to God making me into what he wanted me to be during the early part of my life was racial prejudice and xenophobia–along with a good dose of late-Cold-War red scare (seeing “Commies” behind every doorknob)–transferred to me from one side of my family, though not from my parents.

My father’s family was quite accepting of people. They came from relatively poor backgrounds. My Johnson line, from what I can tell, worked as cobblers in Rhode Island from the time they arrived there (17th Century) until they moved on to upstate New York, then Michigan, then Kansas in 1889. In Kansas they were homesteading farmers in Ness County, which was then on the frontier. As far as I can tell, my father and my aunt were the first children of my Johnson line to go to college. Some of my second cousins still farm the original land of my great grandfather Johnson and his brothers, though they have added quite a bit to it. The Johnsons never really had any opportunity to learn racial prejudice, and homesteaded near a lot of immigrants. My paternal grandmother’s people were coal miners. Both of her parents, and the grandparents who raised her, were first-generation immigrants, and, in the coal mines in the late 19th and early 20th Century, they worked with immigrants from all over. And my great grandfather McCutcheon was the founder of a district of the United Mine Workers in Oklahoma. So, the openness of my father’s family is quite explainable.

My mother’s family was more aristocratic, and much more conservative. Where my father’s family included some Revolutionary War privates, my mother’s included some commissioned officers from the same war, the most famous one a Colonel. It also included a rather large number of ordained ministers, some lawyers and judges, and a couple of college professors. Several of the families had lived in, and come to Kansas from, the South. While my mother had overcome her prejudices (except about Communists) before I was old enough to know about them, her parents had not, and, for a large part of the time I was growing up, her brother, my favorite uncle, who was a journalist, wrote articles for the John Birch Society on the side (though, to his credit, his opinions later matured). In addition, the large, rich, all white Congregational church which employed my mother from the time I was 11 until I was 16 counted one of Wichita’s wealthiest families as members–and they were ardent cold warriors. So I came into some of my later experiences with a rather deep, but never quite comfortable, streak of inherited racism and xenophobia.

God moved me away from my prejudices slowly, not by pain or threats, and not by anything the legal system did, but by giving me experiences with friends (some I have even suspected were angels) from groups my background hated.

The first of these experiences came in the Christian church in which I received Christ–and almost immediately after that event. While that church was mostly white, it had a few African American families in it. One of those families had a son and two daughters who were fairly close to my age and in the same groups I was. They became my friends quickly, and remained so for the four years before I went to graduate school. When I went to college at Wichita State, a mile and a half from home, there was also an African American student in some of my classes, who lived right on the path I walked to and from the University every day. He also became a good friend, and remained one after I found him living near our house in Topeka 20 years later. Find a few good friends, and the prejudice disappears.

I was always interested in science, an interest I inherited from my father, the chemist. But in college I discovered I also had an interest in languages, and in communication–possibly because Aspergers left me some deficits in the social aspects of communication. So I had two majors in undergraduate college: Chemistry and Linguistics. I’ve made my living by Chemistry. But, ever since an Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship meeting during my sophomore year of college, I’ve been aware that I had some ministry calling, and that it had something to do with my linguistic ability. In College and Graduate School, I was fluent in Spanish and near-fluent in German, and the Linguistics degree also contained a good deal of language theory.

When I went away to my first year of graduate school, I lived in the graduate student dormitory at Iowa State. My roommate there was Winai, an agricultural economics student from Thailand. We got along quite well, and not far into that semester, the Thai Student Association adopted me as an honorary member and took me to my first and only college football game, where I watched Iowa State beat Wichita State (where I had just come from) 48-3. Winai, and the other Thai students I came to know over the next year, were Buddhists. So, strike two more prejudices–Asians and Buddhists.

Now, jump forward to my very last year of graduate school, 1984, a year when our lives were falling apart because of that mental illness the State Bar objected to years later. I was an American Protestant ultra-conservative at that time, and still mostly xenophobic. God, with his strange sense of humor, sent alongside us at that time Regina, a sister in the Lord, a beautiful Brazilian spiritualist Catholic transfer student, to help us out of our distress. She was EVERYTHING my background and very conservative church told me I should distrust. For her part, by the time we came along, she thoroughly hated Lawrence, Kansas and couldn’t wait to graduate. But my wife and I became her good friends that Fall semester, while Regina and I were both employed by the university library. She remained our friend, even though she frequently had to reprove me because of my judgmental attitudes toward her culture!

My big collapse came in the Spring semester of 1985, with only a few weeks left before graduation. Regina talked me out of suicide, and stayed in Lawrence for six weeks after she graduated (and could have gone home) to help my wife. My wife and I probably wouldn’t still be married if Regina had gone back to Brazil right after graduation, as she had wanted to. So, say a quick goodbye to xenophobia, Ian!

The last time we saw her, when she came back to visit about a year later, her instructions to me were that I was not to try to repay her for what she had done, but I was “to pass it on.” She has since disappeared completely, without a trace. She is one of those friends I suspect may actually have been an angel.

Three years later, near the end of the Iran-Iraq war, we had an extra room in our house, and the opportunity was presented to us by a friend at church to host a refugee from Iran for nine months. This Iranian lady, who was far too feminist to be safe at home, escaped without her husband–who could not come to this country until about a year and a half later. She also became a good friend. We were later honored to meet her husband, her parents, her sister, and her sister’s family. These all became our friends. None of them wants to kill us, despite what people at church have told us in the years since. They are gentle people who we love and pray for. We would repeat the experience, if we could.

During the years in the early 1990s to about 1996, I was given an opportunity to participate in programs in our Topeka prisons run by Prison Fellowship. Though PF later disappeared from Topeka, I think I may have been blessed more by going into prison than the prisoners were blessed by having PF’s programs there.

Then, in about 2002, we went to an evangelistic meeting at the traditional Pentecostal church we then attended. At that meeting, the evangelist, who also had outreaches in Peru, asked everyone in the congregation to pray to God, right then, to lay a burden for another country on them. It might have been expected that God would motivate me toward Peru, because that was where the evangelist was going, or Brazil. No, God, with his odd sense of humor, reminded me of a place I am very unlikely to ever go–Iran. Thus started my prayers for Iran, and my study of the Middle East, the Eastern churches, and Islam. I’m sure the experience of living with an Iranian refugee in our house for nine months 13 years earlier had something to do with the burden I felt at that meeting.

Finally, about four years ago, God did two more things to open me to people to whom I had previously been closed. The first of these was the arrival of Rev. Jonathan and Betsy Castillo to plant a new Spanish-speaking under the sponsorship of our church and local association. The second was that I took the Perspectives class that was presented at our church, which is a course about missions but even more a course about cultures and cultural sensitivity. The result of the class was that I decided to start to re-learn my Spanish and divide my time between my own church and Pastor Jonathan’s. This, too, has been, and is, a beautiful experience with a very wonderful community of people that many of my old conservative friends rejected.

God is still working on me in this area, but I’m a long way from where I started.