Can you imagine how wonderful and splendid our world could be if we learned to celebrate one another rather than disparage one another? How much beauty are we missing because we have allowed the lines of race, nationality, culture, religion, politics, and circumstance to become walls between us? Our divided world has lost so much to division and cruelty. Yet I believe another world is possible—a world where our differences do not become walls, but windows through which we discover one another.
I learned something about this many years ago while my Papa was still alive. Someone close to me, someone who had claimed to love me, became angry and hurled a racial slur at me. I remember the sting of the moment, but I also remember what happened afterward. As a new immigrant, I had naively encountered the word without fully understanding its history or the wound it carried. In my innocence, I had even used it casually in conversation with someone else, only to become mortified when its meaning and painful history were explained to me.
So I called Papa.
His first words surprised me: “Timothy, no need to be shocked. Who you are is not a reflection of what was said.”
What a gift those words were. Papa would not allow another person’s ugliness to become my identity. He reminded me that another person’s words may wound us, but they do not have the authority to define us.
Then he said something that has remained with me all these years: “We are to celebrate each other rather than denigrate ourselves.”
Papa was teaching me to look beyond the insult and see the larger picture. We are human beings before we are anything else. Our racial identities, nationalities, languages, cultures, and histories may give us different colors and melodies, but they do not make one human life more valuable than another.
Oh, what joy the world misses when we refuse to celebrate one another!
This morning, I experienced a small glimpse of the world I believe is possible. As I sat in worship at First Presbyterian Church of Ann Arbor and participated in the church’s special World Community Sunday service, I felt something deep within me that words can barely contain.
I felt relevant. I felt seen. I felt welcomed. I felt that I belonged.
And somehow, sitting there among people of different backgrounds and experiences, I realized that belonging is more than being invited into a room. Belonging is the quiet assurance that your presence matters. It is the feeling that you do not have to shrink yourself, explain yourself, or stand at the edges looking in. You can simply be there—fully present, fully human, fully received.
Oh, what joy flooded my heart!
For a moment, I thought about the many ways we humans have learned to separate ourselves. I thought about the words that wound, the labels that diminish, the prejudices that create distance, and the walls we build around ourselves. And then I looked around that sanctuary and felt something different.
I felt community.
I felt connection.
I felt the possibility of us.
Perhaps this is what Papa was trying to teach me all those years ago: that we should not spend our precious lives measuring who is worthy of love. We should spend them giving love. We should not ask first, “What makes you different from me?” but rather, “What can I celebrate about you?”
Imagine if our homes felt this way. Imagine our neighborhoods. Imagine our schools, workplaces, churches, cities, and nations. Imagine if the world itself could become a place where people walked through its doors and said, I am seen here. I am valued here. I belong here.
What a beautiful world that would be.
Our differences could become colors in a magnificent composition rather than reasons to tear the composition apart. Our cultures could become instruments in a great orchestra, each preserving its distinctive voice while contributing to something larger and more beautiful.
Harmony is not sameness. Harmony is difference learning to live beautifully together.
That is the world I long to see.
May we learn to see the light in one another. May we recognize something of ourselves in faces different from our own. May we exchange suspicion for curiosity, contempt for compassion, division for understanding, and cruelty for kindness.
And may we remember that when we celebrate another person, we do not diminish ourselves. We enlarge the circle of joy.
Today, at First Presbyterian Church of Ann Arbor, I did not merely hear a message about community.
I experienced it.
I felt it in the welcome. I felt it in the gathering. I felt it in the shared worship. I felt it in the simple, profound realization that there was room for me—not merely in the pew, but in the community.
And my heart whispered:
This is what the world could be.
A place where no one has to wonder whether they belong.
A place where our differences are not weapons but gifts.
A place where brotherhood and sisterhood are not beautiful words reserved for worship, but beautiful practices carried into the streets.
A place where love is stronger than prejudice, where light is stronger than darkness, and where the beauty of one does not threaten the beauty of another.
May our world become such a place.
May we see the love, the light, and even a reflection of ourselves in one another. May our wounded world heal through the simple but revolutionary act of celebrating each other.
And when we finally learn to live that way, perhaps our lives will become one great song—brotherhood, sisterhood, friendship, compassion, and peace rising together like a sweet and beautiful offering to our Creator.
We belong to one another.
And oh, what joy there is when we finally know it.
