Unlikely Friendships

     This morning as I was riding to church with some new friends from training, I was thinking that Atlanta looks familiar in a way, like something I've seen in a movie. Eventually, I remembered that this is where one of my favorite movies, Driving Ms. Daisy, was filmed. If you haven't seen it, I don't want to spoil it, but basically it is the story of an older southern, white, Jewish woman who is reluctantly driven around by an African American chauffeur that her son hires for her after it becomes clear that she can no longer drive herself. Although she is extremely resistant to accepting his help at first, the two eventually form a bond, leading up to one of the films most touching moments when Ms. Daisy tells the chauffeur she once despised, "Hoke, you're my best friend."
     Although the movie takes place during the civil rights movement, some of the social tensions it explores are still present today. I'm sure you know that, because those tensions are talked about it all the time. We hear about them on the news, we read about them on social media, we listen to sermons about them in church. I personally have sat in some really challenging discussions about them during these first two weeks of training. So, since the problem clearly isn't that we aren't aware or don't care about the tensions that separate us as human beings, why are they still so prevalent in our society?
     That's to big of a question for someone like me to answer in one blog post, but I might have a small part of the much larger answer. We can talk forever about how we all need to accept and love each other, and it's definitely an important thing to discuss, but nothing changes until we actually do it.
     Because of the mission trips I've been on, I already have some friends from other countries and cultures, and through Global Mission Fellows I am now gaining many more. I'm ashamed to admit this, but today I posted a picture of me with some of those friends, and then wondered what people from my hometown will think of the fact that I am the only white person in that picture. Will they think it's strange that I would befriend people who look different than me, will they think I've got a point to prove? But after thinking about it, I realized that me worrying about these things does absolutely nothing except waste time I could be using to think about more productive things. So, I'll continue to get to know my new friends, and I'll be proud of the pictures I take with them. Like Ms. Daisy and Hoke, we can be friends no matter how different our backgrounds are. And with those friendships, we'll begin to change the injustices of our world.