Maryn holds forth on racial equality

This is Maryn's most recent picture of our family. I'm particularly pleased that I look like Charlie Brown with spectacles and a yarmulke.



This is an illustration from Maryn's totally self-initiated Family Home Evening lesson on equality and treating others with respect. She got the idea in her head that she wanted to give the lesson and that she'd take care of everything. So for several days she made different drawings and mapped out her strategy and then last night she took center stage and, after the song and prayer, pushed her hair away from her eyes and said, "Jesus wants us to be nice to everyone -- people with brown skin and white skin, people in wheelchairs, people who don't speak the language and can't understand English, and people who are blind."

She did a little role play with two drawings of little girls, one white, one black. Then she held up this drawing that shows that we can all be "nis" to one another. Notice the cat and dog getting along together in the lower left corner and Jesus with the super-long, almost ZZ Top-like beard on the right. Needless to say, Suzanne and I were both pretty impressed.

For all the other difficulties associated with living in Michigan, I can say that it's unlikely that Maryn ever would have thought to give a lesson like this if we were still living in Idaho. I like that her friends at school have names like Abba and Mehereen. I like that black people are neither a threat nor an interesting curiosity to her -- but that they are people. I don't think that's something she'd get so much of back home.