Southwestern Union Record

Both of my parents were Ukrainian by nationality. They learned to speak several other languages growing up (Polish, Russian, and German) but the Ukrainian language was what they always spoke at home. My bother and I learned to speak Ukrainian before we learned English. When we went to school, our first-grade teachers thought there was something wrong with us because they didn’t understand us. After meeting and visiting with our parents, our teachers realized we weren’t just speaking “mumbo jumbo,” but we were actually conversing the best we could in the only language we knew at that point in time. 

In the first grade, even though my brother and I looked pretty much like all of our classmates, we were considered very different. I didn’t know anything about diversity; in fact, I had never heard the word. However, I learned quickly what it meant to be “different.” 

When my sons were still little and they went to visit my parents on their farm, they would always get a dose of Ukrainian culture.  To them, their grandparents were just a little strange.  While they loved Grandma’s cooking, it was very different. When it was time to eat, Grandpa and Grandma would stand to offer the prayer of thanks. Food was placed on the table in the pan in which it was prepared or heated. If you didn’t take as much as Grandma thought you should, she would insist that your helping was too small and that you needed to get more. When the supper meal was over, Grandpa would not leave the table but would have a hot drink, and dialogue that was started over the meal would be just the beginning of that evening’s conversation—at the table.

A few years later, after I took my family with me to hold an evangelistic series of meetings in Ukraine, my sons came to me and said, “We always thought Grandpa and Grandma were strange in how they did things, but while in Ukraine, we discovered that everything they did was an everyday, normal way of doing things.”  The diversity observed in their own context was quickly removed when they had the opportunity to see a bigger picture and context. 

Perhaps if we could see people through the eyes of our Savior, what appears to be different or strange would quickly be seen as ordinary and natural. God does not evaluate us by the externals, but by our hearts.