Open Hearts, Open Doors - Guest Blog by Megan Heiney Carpenter

As we celebrate Black History Month this February, I want to say a special thank you to my parents.

“Why?”, you may ask. Neither of them is a person of color. That’s true. But my parents did something special for me. They taught me that skin color has no bearing on who a person is.

They both grew up in small towns in the Midwest, during a generation where it was common to see racism and bias towards people of color. I can remember my mother sharing the story of the first time she ever saw a brown-skinned man up close in her teenage years. In her ignorance and innocence, she asked to see the palms of the man’s hands, noting that they were pink. The kind man honored her request, seeing in her the chance to educate a very naïve and innocent teenager.

Both my parents were raised in a culture where it was not common for ‘white and black’ people to mingle, let alone be in any kind of real relationship. Even their own parents had some degree of bias toward people of color – it was the culture they grew up in. It was all they saw. It would have been easy for my parents to adapt to this culture, to the belief system that was all around them.

But they didn’t. Instead, they chose to move overseas as a family with two children. They chose to move our family to a place where everyone would look different than us. They chose to put my brother and I in international schools where we learned that diversity should be celebrated. In short, they chose a different path.

I am so thankful that my parents modeled love to me. Because they didn’t just move to another country, where everyone looked different and spoke a different language. They built relationships with these new people. They invited them into our home and taught us to humbly enter their homes and accept the friendship offered to us. They taught us that people of all different colors, race, wealth, and backgrounds are valuable and that God sees beauty in them all.

I hope I can teach the same message to my own daughter. I hope I can teach her that there is beauty in the differences she sees around us and that anyone who cannot understand this truth is not to be hated but instead should be pitied. They should be pitied because they are experiencing a limited life, one devoid of beauty, and that should bring tears to our eyes rather than hate to our hearts.