Top Ten Ways to Increase Your Sensitivity to Oneness

Wow!   Times have changed!   How has your understanding of the world been altered since you were a child?   Did you grow up in a rural setting and now you live in an urban community?

Were you able to walk all over town or your neighborhood by yourself when you were in grade school?   As you know, now we cannot let our children play unattended even in our own front yards.

Were people of a different skin color an oddity in your childhood neighborhood/community?   When you, as a child, heard a language being spoken that was foreign to your ears, was your curiosity perked, did you wonder what they were saying or, were you afraid they were talking unfriendly about you?   My how our world has changed!

When your task group on diversity (a sub-group of your Faith In Action Commission) met recently, we discussed this topic.   Some of us had never experienced “different” people as children.   Yet, some of us had grown up with diversity.

In my grade school were Native Americans, Hispanics, Blacks, Asians and Whites.   Integration happened when I was in the sixth grade.   I had friends in many races. My folks were teachers and we were never allowed to be disrespectful of anyone.   Riding my school bus was a girl who was in a wheel chair and had to be physically lifted from her chair up into the bus and belted in, and a wheel chair was waiting at school for her to be placed in when we arrived.   A young man in my class “walked” the halls on crutches – his legs did not work.

This task group is charged with helping Disciples in Oklahoma become more sensitive to the oneness of our individual situations and less distracted by the differences that we exhibit.   It was felt that one way we might encourage this sensitivity was to promote the Top 10 was to be more sensitive to our oneness.