“Can I go play outside?” Elijah asks.
“No, but maybe later, because the sun’s too strong right now. You’d get burned.” Mom explains.
“Well I want to be brown.” He says stubbornly.
“You’d get red, not brown,” I mumble, rolling my eyes but still getting his point. He’s like me: he can’t tan, but he sure does freckle. But I know what he’s really thinking.
“Brown goes better with everything.” Elijah tells us, drawing out the word everything. “Blue, black, red, yellow, green, orange, pink-” He makes a face and giggles. “-Expect pink is for girls… It’s just… better.” He says confidently.
“Everyone here is brown!”
This is how a five-year-old boy tells you everything you’ve been thinking for the past two and a half years. Except he says it in just four or five sentences. And he breaks your heart.
My brother wants to fit in. Like I want to fit it.
He wants to be like everyone else. I want to be like the others too.
And nearly everyone else just happens to be brown.
I’ve been dealing with it too. Language, for me at least, is the big one, but we still have the same problem.
It’s that we are different.
It’s become an ugly word inside my own head – different.
Because the truth is? Different isn’t always fun.
Different means that, sometimes, I don’t understand them. I don’t always get the language, culture, etiquette, or what I’m supposed to do. It is hard.
Different means they have plenty of chances to laugh at us. At what we say, what we do, and what we try to say and do. It is hard.
Different means they stare. Different means they always stare. And that is hard.
Brown wouldn’t be so bad. Being able to fit in – any way at all – would be… nice.
But, even though it’s hard, I’m not here to worry about that.
I’m not here to mope around because I look different, sound different, and act different from everyone else. I do all that, but the truth is… I kinda need to get over it.
Because I am here to spread Jesus, I am here to love, and I am here to be a light.
And I have to take deep breaths. Lots and lots and lots of deep breaths. And accept it.
I am not brown. I am not brown! Waking up to another day – every day – of being an outsider can be hard. And it is hard.
It has taken two years to be accepted into this village’s community. Accepted, that is, for who I am. Which… still doesn’t make me one of them. Because I am a foreigner.
I do not speak fluent Spanish, I do not always “beautifully mesh” with this culture, and I will always be different.
Yes. It is hard.
But you know what?
Hard isn’t going to stop me.
And hard definitely isn’t going to stop God.
