Flying into Colorado last week, I looked out the window and was struck by the patchwork below. From the sky, the land is clearly marked, plot by plot, square by square. Boundaries drawn. Divisions visible.
It reminded me of how clearly so many have drawn their own lines in today’s world. Political lines. Racial lines. Religious lines. Walls erected to keep others out, or to keep ourselves untouched.
And yet, from above, it looked like a quilt. A tapestry. What could have been seen as separation, instead looked like something stitched together. A whole made from many parts.
𝐸 𝑝𝑙𝑢𝑟𝑖𝑏𝑢𝑠 𝑢𝑛𝑢𝑚: Out of many, one. It is printed on our money, but is it printed on our hearts?
The image stayed with me, even as it eventually disappeared beneath the clouds. It resurfaced today in the most unexpected place as I went for medical testing. I encountered people from all walks of life: different races, different ages, different stories. Every single one received, and offered, kindness. Grace flowed freely, like the oxygen upon which I have come to rely.
I felt like Much Afraid, the main character in Hannah Hurnard’s allegorical book, Hinds’ Feet on High Places, as she proclaimed, over and over again, “It is happy to love! It is happy to love!”
It is! I concur.
At one point today, a precious lady said to me, after an extended conversation and a bonafide heart-connection, “I feel like I was meant to meet you today, and I don’t usually do well with white people.”
Her honesty moved me deeply. It showed me, up close and personal, that there are still bridges being built. That healing happens when we step out of our comfort zones and choose to see people not as categories, but as fellow travelers in need of dignity, kindness, and love.
We were never meant to live walled off. What feels like separation from below might, from a higher perspective, be something far more sacred, with common stories, struggles, and souls, stitched into more beauty than we can begin to see from the ground.
Perspective changes everything.
Perhaps the work before us isn’t to erase the lines, but to soften them. To cross them. To join hands across them. And in doing so, to make a quilt of grace, where every person has a square, and every square belongs.
May we trade our boundaries for bridges, our walls for wonder, and our lines for love.
It’s what Jesus did.
It’s what we are called to do.
A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.
~ 𝐉𝐨𝐡𝐧 𝟏𝟑:𝟑𝟒-𝟑𝟓