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God's Timing
We were walking down a semi-dark hallway in Juvenile Hall. On both sides were closed blue doors with a small square window covered with wire. And behind each window was a face silently watching as we walked by.
It was eerie. But we had volunteered to give a Christmas party for these kids and there was no turning back now.
Armed with streamers, games, home baked goodies and Christmas carols, we set up shop in their common area and waited.
The doors opened and the kids began to walk in. We had hoped to have as many volunteers as there were kids so we could talk with them one-on-one, but there were at least three of them to every one of us. We had been told to expect a large percentage of African Americans and Hispanics. Instead, to my surprise, most of these kids were white, blue-eyed "Skin Heads," part of a Neo Nazi group that was thriving in Orange County, California.
My heart sank. Being Hispanic, I was definitely out of my comfort zone now.
One of the games we had planned as an ice-breaker consisted of an inner circle of people facing an outer circle of an equal number of participants. One of the circles would rotate until the leader yelled "Stop," and then we'd be given a question to talk about with the person who happened to be standing in front of us. During one of the rotations, I found myself standing face to face with one of these Neo-Nazi kids. I had experienced the coldness of prejudice before, but never like this. The eyes of this 16 or 17 year old dripped with disdain.
I breathed a prayer, "Lord, I'm over my head here. Help!"
God's timing is amazing. Out of all the questions we could have been given, the one we were to talk about was "What language do you like?" "Ich liebe Deutsch," he proudly said fully expecting me not to understand him.
"You too?!" I answered, "I went to a German school in Peru. They taught us math, art, music and world history in German." And even though that had been a long time ago and I could no longer carry a conversation in German if my life depended on it, I asked him, "Sprichts du Deutsch?" You could have picked up his jaw from the floor. The disdain in his eyes was replaced by total confusion. I had suddenly become an actual person … who understood the language he purported to love. And he didn't know what to do with me. He sheepishly acknowledged that he didn't speak German.
I was smiling. There was a scared kid in the midst of the hate, and I was thankful that my Father had enabled me to see him.
Prejudice... It really is a weird thing. It is based on a sense of entitlement born of ignorance "For who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive?" (1 Cor. 4:7).
It was God who gave us our heritage, the color of our skin and of our eyes, our sex, the country we were born in, the family we belong to, the language we speak, the abilities we have. Even the self-made man was given the intelligence and the health to be able to work.
What do we have that we have not been given? And if we have received it all, why do we act as if we had somehow deserved it?
It was time for my new friend's circle to move again ... I smiled at him and said, "Aufwiedersehen!" Despite himself, he actually smiled back ... It was a start.
--Maria Lund