Children of God

By: Joseph Murdy
This past weekend my wife and I watched a movie called, The Last Mimzy. The movie was great, but what struck me the most came at the end. A teacher was telling her students the story of what happened (throughout the movie) and how the human race had been saved. The students were from every corner of the world. It was not an all white cast, or Latino, or so on. It made me think about the world we live in and how segregated we still are. Not just in our society, but in our thinking. We live in a society where just about everything can be categorized or described by race. How we dress, what we eat, what we watch, where we spend Saturday night, even where we live. We look at people in terms of what group they belong to, not who they belong to. We are all children of God, made in God’s image and likeness.

Henri Nouwen once said, “To become neighbors is to bridge people. As long as there is distance between us and we cannot look into one another’s eyes, all sorts of false ideas and images arise. We give them names, make jokes about them, cover them with our prejudices, and avoid direct contact…we forget that they love as we love, care for their children as we care for ours, become sick and die as we do.”

As Christians, stereotypes are unacceptable. If we are made in the image and likeness of God, then there can be in reality no divisions among us. For in God there is no division. We are all the same in God’s eyes, and at the same time God made each of us unique.

Other than the guy down the street from you, have you given much thought to who you consider your neighbor to be? Henri Nouwen concludes his writing by saying, “Only when we have the courage to cross the road and look in one another’s eyes can we see there that we are children of the same God and members of the same human family.”
In the movie we watched I was not blown away by the plot or story line, it was a simple image of the global community at peace with one another. It seems to me that the ideal Kingdom is not based on social status or racial distinction, but rather by what we all share in common together. All people have this one thing in common; we are all children of God.