When we prepared to bring Taye into our lives, the adoption agency had us go through diversity-training. The idea class being that our once very vanilla family (minus a hip-hop record or twelve) was going to bring a very chocolate child our home. While this was an eye opener to the fact that our lives were quite monochromatic, we didn’t think that bringing Taye into our home would change much.
We weren’t completely wrong, yet we weren’t right either.
When we brought Taye into our lives, all of a sudden we realized just how white our lives really were.
Every book we had in the house was about white children.
Every doll we had in the house was Caucasian or at best sun-tanned.
All the papers that came home from church were—you guessed it—filled with white kids.
And there was Taye who at one point wondered aloud “When I gonna turn ‘nilla?”
We worked hard to celebrate Taye and how God made him. We brought diversity into our home with books and dolls that appear more like our family.
Then one Sunday this past summer while attending LifeChurch.TV, Taye brought home this:
“Dad, he like me!”
I could have cried.
Even creative people in the church with our radars up, sometimes miss something so simple: Have options for crafts that celebrate children just as God created them.
Just a little bit of extra money and time can mean the world to a family who sometimes feels out-of-place. Make your church a refuge for these families not a place where they are constantly reminded that they are different.
