January 30 – Equality
Nathanael Ankeny
Read: Ephesians
4:22-25
One night in
grad school, I was walking down the hall on my way out of the music building
and came upon one of my professors. “Goodnight, Dr. Graves,” I said. Further
down the hall, I saw Tom, the building's custodian. "Goodnight, Tom,"
I said in greeting. "Goodnight," he replied. The juxtaposition of the
two greetings struck me; Tom performs an important role by keeping the building
clean, yet no one addresses him with any special title. My teachers, on the
other hand, were usually called Doctor or Professor.
That evening
I started thinking about several questions: can we treat people equally while
referring to them in different ways? If titles are meant to show respect, was
there something about my professors that made them more deserving of respect
than others? Was I being called to address my professors without titles as I do
everyone else? As I thought and prayed about it, I began to see that when we
choose to address people differently, we put them in different categories,
usually according to their socio-economic level.
God made it
clear to me that I needed to act on this new conviction, and though it was difficult
for me to tell my professors how I was going to address them, most of them
understood. One professor, however, told me that I was being narrow-minded and
should reconsider. This difficult encounter made me sense the power in what I
was being called to do, and how it stripped away a façade constructed in
academia meant to make some people feel more important than others.
As I obeyed
Christ's call, I felt a new sense of accountability to treat everyone with
respect. After all, if my witness of referring to each person the same way was
to have integrity, I had to treat people equally, too. I learned that treating
people with respect has little to do with how we address them, and much do with
whether or not we are viewing them as fellow children of God.
Queries:
Am I grateful for the
people around me and the work they do?
Do I treat people in
all walks of life in a way that values them as children of God?
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