Prayer and Prejudice, and A Little Pride

You Never Know Until You Try.

I encountered someone engaging in one of my pet peeves this week. It’s something that’s rampant in our world even though we’re so inundated by politically correct language and—supposedly—behavior that we sometimes don’t even notice it. Here in America, “the land of the free,” we’re not supposed to have discrimination (or prejudice, which means the same thing, just minus the action) based on race, sex, age, weight, religious practice, and so forth, but we all know that we do. Sometimes it’s blatant, but I think most of the times it’s subtle. It’s just there, set up in our system of “the way things are done.” I repeat: institutional discrimination is subtle because it’s just understood to be the way things are. Satan is, after all, extremely subtle, as we’re told in Genesis. While I despise unfair, mindless, arbitrary prejudging, which is what prejudice is, I can muster more respect for someone who is open about his or her prejudices than sor someone who hides them. At least then I know what I’m up against.

I’ve observed so much subtle discrimination over the years that it caught me by surprise when I was on the receiving end of a blatant discriminatory practice this week, and I’ve had to remind myself that Jesus calls us to pray for those who persecute us and bless those who curse us. (Matthew 5: 44). At the time, I handled the face-to-face situation fairly well, though not as well as I would've liked. I wasn’t as bold as I wish I’d been. Later, once I was alone, Satan made sure to appeal to my pride by whispering to me that it wasn’t fair, that I deserved better than I got in the situation, and that I should go back to the people involved and really give them have a good dressing down.

My flesh really wants to do that, but I know that harsh words will just stir up trouble. What I’m doing instead is praying for the individuals—and for myself. I want to be someone who gets a point across without resorting to using Satan’s tactics. He loves to cause trouble. Maybe God wants to handle this one without my “help,” or maybe He will urge me to go back and gently address the situation again. I haven’t gotten any clear instruction beyond the one to pray for those involved in the encounter. I’m doing that. I’m praying for institutional discrimination to not be the norm, and I’m praying for everyone to fight against it when they encounter it, because it hurts everyone. It devalues people made in God’s image, and when one person suffers, the ripple effect means that we all suffer.

I think life really is like “6 Degrees of Separation.” For
example, you may not be the one denied the job because you are a 55-year-old woman of color, but your therapist’s teenaged son may encounter her in traffic as she drives home from the demeaning job interview in which she’s obviously been discounted because of her age and/or her race. She’s distracted, not driving well, and the teenager, impatient to get to his destination, passes her when he shouldn’t. Another car is coming, and boom! You get the idea.

So, I’ll keep praying for all of us caught up in this world of imperfect people who judge others based on completely arbitrary things instead of, as Dr. Martin Luther King so eloquently put it, “ . . . the content of (their) character.”