This gentle protest song, like
“He’s got the whole world,” would remind us profoundly that God
loves all the world, not just us. “The earth is the Lord’s and the
fullness thereof,” the psalmist proclaims. The wonderful diversity
of peoples and races and cultures, like that of nature, was created
by God. God sees us as one.
One of our prayers reads, “Lord Jesus
Christ, you stretched out your loving hands on the hard wood of the
cross, that all might come within the reach of your saving embrace.”
The cross is God’s great hug of the whole world, showing us the holy
and expansive love that saves us all.
There is no such thing as narrow
Christianity. The cross is one light for one world.
One of the best ways to experience
this truth is by taking mission trips. Some of these are to
different parts of the world. Many people I know say that their life
was changed by going to Haiti, to Honduras, to Namibia, to Brazil,
or to Somalia, to share in Christian mission work. Mission trips
include journeys closer to home too: inner city work, Sawyerville,
Appalachian ministries, our ministries among the poor. Our lives can
be changed by crossing continents or by crossing the street.
Such journeys take us out of our
familiar comfort zones to expand the horizons of our lives. They
enable us to see the world whole and show us God’s grace at work in
other cultures and in people different from us. Each helps us get
out of the little box that we usually live in and realize, as the
prayer says, that God has “made of one blood all the peoples of the
earth.” Our minds are opened and our hearts are enlarged.
Such mission trips make real the
teaching of the song that God has big hands.
Those big hands have room for you and
me and the whole world over. In all you do as the Episcopal
Churchwomen and as the Diocese of Alabama let us live and let this
show.
Your servant in Christ,