God's Good Diversity

by Bennett Jared Spong

My thoughts on first awaking, are like most people's, a slow piecing together of time and place, but this morning was different. There was a sense of anxiety and urgency. I knew immediately that this was the last day of a perfectly wonderful week at Pawley's Island, South Carolina. The last night I would spend in this grand old building known as Pelican Inn. Although there wasn't much daylight yet, I knew there was one more shot on the disposable camera by my bed. If I could wrestle free of this pillow and kick off these sheets, I could capture the sun rise as it came up over the Atlantic Ocean. I was desperate to take this time and place back to London, to some how hold it, to freeze it on celluloid, to remind me in the dark of winter, perhaps stuck in some motionless traffic jam, that this was the real world. This was how God intended it really to be.

I stepped carefully over the sun-tanned bodies of my wife and children, victims of last night's marathon Harry Potter read, out onto the tree top porch, down the wooden stairs, along the boardwalk through the moss laden live oaks, past the web of the giant banana spider and then up the stairs to the top of a great sand dune -- the steadfast protector of this special place.

As the pink/orange sun began to break the horizon I began to analysis which direction to point the camera. Where was the definitive shot? What was the supremely representative moment? Should I wait for light? But as this morning continued to unfold I began to think how futile my ambitions had been. Could I really capture what I was experiencing?

As each wave rolled in, spreading its white foamy moment across the sand, I knew that my photographic plans were distorting what was being offered. What lay before me was the timeless unfolding of God's creativeness. Where one moment is never the same, where each movement never repeats itself, the magnificence of a God whose creative powers are beyond human comprehension; where each wave arrives to wash uniquely upon the beach, bringing life from the ocean to the shore before retreating silently back to its source.

I am now back in London and the papers are still discussing the problems of immigration. When will it stop? How many people can we absorb? We have responsibilities to our former colonies; they're taxing public services; they are just economic migrants exploiting our generosity. The arguments go on and on and the people keep coming. London, and specifically the east end of London has always been the destination of immigrant people seeking refuge. This was the area where historically the down side of a class entrenched society lived. Today they still come from Eastern Europe, Sudan, Sri Lanka, from wherever there is war and famine they come. seeking life for their children, a chance to be, to live in the manner in which God has made them.

At Langdon School in East London where Sally and I have taught for twenty years there are 52 languages spoken, where every imaginable skin tone exists, where true horror stories are written about in English assignments, where they know that mutual respect and peaceful coexistence have frightening counterparts. These representatives of God's vast ocean of humanity are but a portion of the diversity that exists across our planet. They come here now because there is a poverty in the world beyond our consumer saturated imaginations. They come because people are living in a world where slavery is s every bit as real today as it was 200 years ago in my native South Carolina. They come out of desperation because many are faced with the simple choice of move or die. So they come in hope, to strange lands, to different languages and bewildering life styles and some will say to them as they arrive -- this is not your place, you belong where you have come from, you can't stay, you are destroying a way of life, you are a threat to faith and place, we want to keep it like it is.

But those anxious responses are like trying to fit eternity into one moment. There is nothing static or fixed within time; all is change. All this change is God's creative purpose for a destiny that includes all of humanity. Christ did not come for one part of humanity and we can not respond to Christ and ignore human suffering. Genesis says we are made in the image of God, and thus God is an image of limitless diversity. As Goethe wrote, "we are part of a part that at first was a whole."

I never took that last photograph. I now know how to remember that marvelous morning of sky, waves and light. I need only to see and hear the children arriving at our school gate, each bringing a part of God's good diversity. Their laughter evokes that glorious Carolina sun rise and I feel the creative power of God. In their excitement I can hear breaking waves and calling sea gulls and I can also hear the words of St. Julian of Norwich that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

Bennett lives with his wife Sally and their three children in London and is currently studying to be a non-stipendiary Anglican priest in the diocese of Southwark in London.