Lauren Sparks

The Sparks Notes

Why I Re-Love the Word Tolerance

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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

The cry for tolerance has long been a plea for groups feeling oppressed and marginalized.  For hundreds of years, religions, economic classes, political parties, and racial and ethnic minorities, and more recently – the LGBTQ+ community –  have asked for freedoms and forbearance from the majority of society.  As a teenager and into my young adult years, I grew to hate the word tolerance.  The root word TOLERATE left a bad taste in my mouth.  I thought I could either “like” someone or “tolerate” them, but I couldn’t do both.  Almost as if “tolerate” and “disdain” were first cousins.

 

I’m not sure how I arrived at my skewed interpretation.  Maybe it’s because I only ever heard the word bandied about in circles of hatred.  Maybe because each occurence of it in the news involved protests or violence or the like.  But somewhere along the way I decided I would never say I tolerate anyone.  I loved everyone – whether we agreed or not.  That was that.  And I felt like a much better Christian because of it.

 

In our current, volatile, easily offendable climate we seem to have forgotten some basics.  Like how to love, how to disagree, and even how to converse.  People and groups of all walks of life wish to be seen and heard – but don’t offer the same courtesy.  We all want people to see through the same lenses we wear.  And since the bulk of our communication is done by computer or phone, we no longer have to look at someone and see his or her pain and frustration.

 

To love is to agree.  That seems to be today’s unspoken mantra.  We vilify those who see things differently in this country and rarely try to walk a mile in anyone else’s shoes.  In A Practical Guide to Culture:  Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today’s World, the authors refer to this as ad hominem fallacy – attacking the person rather than the argument.

 

Brett Kunkle, one of the authors of the book, spoke at my church recently.  He gave this definition of tolerate – “to recognize and respect others beliefs without sharing them”.  I found a similar explanation on thefreedictionary.com.  “To recognize and respect (the rights, beliefs, and practices of others).”  I searched several dictionaries, and more negative definitions exist, but I prefer this one.  Tolerance assumes there IS some disagreement.  And yet respect and recognition coincide with it.  All people are created equal.  We are all image bearers of the Creator.  “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”  Genesis 1:27 NASB  All ideas and behaviors, however, are not necessarily equal.  So as long as there are people, we will have differences of opinion.  

 

We need to once again embrace the idea that debates can be civil.  Love and disagreement can lay side by side…in the same bed…under the same roof.  We need to recognize that one belief or characteristic does not a whole person make.  Just because you vote differently than I do, does not mean I can’t see that you are kind and generous and fun to be with.  And just because our socio-economic backgrounds are like night and day doesn’t mean you aren’t smart and dependable and humble.  My race, class, religion, sex, family status or sexual orientation are not the whole of who I am.  And they don’t define you either.

 

Are you a tolerant person?

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“If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body [a]to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.”  1 Corinthians 13:1-3 NASB

 

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InstaEncouragements, Literacy Musing Mondays, Hello…Monday,

Dream Team link up, The Good. The Random. The Fun.

BloggerClubUK, Tea and Word Tuesday, Purposeful Faith,

GraceFull Tuesday Link-Up, Different Dream,

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Worth Beyond Rubies, #TellHisStory Link Up, Porch Stories,

Encouraging Word Wednesday, Tune In Thursday,

Stories of Hope, Moments of Hope, IHeart Verse Link Party,

A Blogging Good Time, Fresh Market Friday, Feature Friday Time,

Friendship Friday Blog Hop, Faith on Fire, Traffic Jam Weekend,

Faith ‘n Friends, Dancing with Jesus, Grace & Truth, Booknificent

 

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White Picket Fences – A Book Review and Giveaway!

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I picked up Amy Julia Becker’s book White Picket Fences:  turning toward love in a world divided by privilege to supplement the journey I’ve been taking to better understand white privilege and the role I play in it.  You can read my freshman attempts at analysis here and here.  Ms. Becker is also walking this path and asking similar questions.

 

The author comes from privilege and affluence that even I can’t understand, but we are similar in our love for books.  She stocked her shelves with classics for herself and her children.  The Secret Garden, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables and many more.  But she slowly realized that the characters they contained were very white.  She searched for classics that would color a rainbow on her shelves and was distraught to find slaves and servants and dangerously displaced Native Americans.  She didn’t want to teach her children this version of race, but our history is unfortunately overflowing with it.  She determined that we needed to “wrestle with a complex past to help us write a different story for the future.”

 

Ms. Becker doesn’t claim to have all the answers.  In fact, she confesses to a fear of not knowing how to truly feel compassion, saying,  “Im afraid that I will always be set apart from people who do not share my advantages.  I am afraid that I am helpless to do anything about very real inequity.”  In response she researched the racial violence that appears all over the news of late and found that “police interaction with black men has not increased in recent years.  People like me – people who live in predominantly white America – have simply become more aware of it.”  And people like me.

 

In the life of her daughter with Down Syndrome, Amy Julia sees a glimmer of understanding for those who’s identity falls outside the norm.  She writes of realizing that had she lived in Nazi Germany, her daughter would have been taken away and killed, just as the Jewish people who were singled out – her wealth or white skin powerless to stop it.  I remember having the same type of revelation about my daughter Shelby when on Ellis Island for the first time.  If my family had come through as imigrants in the early years of our country, my husband and I would have been offered two choices.  1.  Leave Shelby in a “hospital” there and start our new life without her or 2.  Turn around and make the long and dangerous voyage back to whatever bad situation we came from – whether or not (probably not) we had the money for fare.

This book declares that, “We deface the image of God every time we disdain or abuse another human being.”  It’s message?  Every human is valued by nature of being known and loved by almighty God.  “It will take thousands upon thousands…to bow our knees and take up a posture of humility, of listening to others instead of insisting on hearing our own voices, of admitting our own complicity in harm, of opening our hands and hearts to healing even when it hurts.”  This book is not a solution to inequity.  It’s just a beginning.  And I definitely recommend beginning by reading it.

 

Tyndale House Publishers kindly provided me with a complimentary copy of this book.  I am giving away my copy to one reader of this post!  All you have to do is subscribe over on the right side of this page to receive my posts every week (and I promise I almost never send you more than one message a week).  If you are already subscribed – thank you so much! – you can still be entered by leaving a comment!  One commenter/ subscriber will be selected at random and notified via email next Friday November 16.  You can also purchase your own copy of the book here from Amazon or anywhere good books are sold.  If you choose to purchase this or anything else through my link, I will receive a small commission to help offset the costs of my website at no extra cost to you.  Thank you in advance!

 

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