Meetimg God in Celebrating

One Another's Differences

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I got to meet my godchild last month, after waiting years after she was born during the COVID lockdowns to finally make the trip to the Appalachians. Precious and precocious, fierce and feral, she is a curious kiddo who loves to read and asks great questions. It was hard to leave after spending the week, but I think we’ll be great penpals after not too long, which will give her a chance to not only learn to read handwriting, but to practice her own left-handed lettering. Remembering her right from her left is easy when she thinks about the hand she holds her crayons with.

In the year of our Lord 2026 it seems difficult to imagine that such a child might have once her left hand tied behind her back, or struck by a ruler, for attempting to write with it, but I know we are only a generation or so away from that practice. How much effort it must take to focus on changing one aspect of a person’s brain wiring in disregard for the impact on every other part of their self-expression and understanding. My aunt and father are both left handed, and joke they were the only ones in the family who are ‘in the right mind,’ but they still had to contort their hands to fit scissors not made for them, and learn a different penmanship altogether so they did not smear their writing.

Somehow, I ended up being born right handed, like the majority of the population. As a godparent, it is not my job to train up my godkiddo into being right handed rather than left handed, just because I am right handed. We are blessed and honored to get to meet these kids as they show us who they are and discover what they can do. God makes us all in God’s own image, and that is not for us to box up and sell or define by our own limits, it is for us to discover and explore and delight in.

There are ways we function together in society which lead to better communication and care, and there are ways we learn and grow and are challenged and invited into deeper knowing when we gather in trust and mutual dedication to hospitality. Just as Jesus shows up in the Eucharist to feed all who are hungry, whether we receive communion with our right hand or our left, we are blessed to meet God in one another’s shared joys and in celebrating one another’s differences.

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​Grace and Peace,

Pastor Andrew Tobias Nelson