Many persons celebrated the Labor Day weekend with backyard barbecues, Labor Day shopping, evening concerts and… hair appointments.  This coming weekend, I will serve as one of the guest speakers for Sharon Bible Fellowship’s women’s retreat and we will be traveling to Lancaster, Pennsylvania to share in the theme “Fit for the Master’s Use” (II Timothy 2.21).  I will be delivering a poem on Friday night and teaching two sessions on Saturday so I did not want to include hair on my list of things to do while away.  And though, I had planned to write and even had a title in mind for Monday’s post, let’s just say that an eventful day at a hair braiding salon did not allow for it.  I’ll skip the irritating examples of the fact that my time is not as precious to others as it is to me.  Just note that all I did was smell barbecue yesterday.  But, I digress. 

With the world becoming more technologically connected, the time that I have to spend with myself seems to be reduced each day as the demands of social media are everpresent.  One is expected to be seemingly omnipresent and always speaking through one if not all of the various outlets– daily.  While it is good to be informed, such a barrage of information does not allow one to respond to each and every email, tweet, text and Facebook update.  Just the thought of it all is exhausting.  We simply cannot act upon all of the information that we receive. Whether sorting, deleting or replying, all are answers that are being asked of us on a daily basis.

And so it is with race.  Race is constantly sending us messages, updating its status in the lives of others, posting on the walls of our worlds.  Race wants us to know that it is here and it wants a response.  While waiting in the airport for my plane to arrive, I was informed of President Obama’s choice of  Rockwell’s painting, “The Problem We All Live With,”  a depiction of Ruby Bridges being escorted to school.   When I arrived at home, I was asked if I had read the ESPN story that asked, “What if Michael Vick were white?”  I went out to dinner with my husband at a restaurant in our neighborhood only to find on the menu, the option to order “Buckwheat’s Fried Chicken.”    The latter prompted an immediate delete; this establishment will not receive my business.  All of these are messages from race that are asking for a response.  So, here it is.

There will be hurdles. But, I’m not in the business of jumping them. I like to kick them over, drag them off the track even because that’s not the race that I was trained for.  I am called to live a race-less life and so my response to all of race’s messages is not to ignore them but simply to decline the invitation to become a friend of race, to remove its posts from the wall of my world and to not retweet its messages.  I have but one message and it is the gospel of Jesus Christ.  It is this race that I am called to run and race has nothing to do with it.