Love your neighbor

Sara said something interesting today. 

We were talking about what some stereotypes are for Mexicans and, after a few days spent here, if we have known them to be accurate or inaccurate. 

She mentioned that the way that the United States of America came to be says much about the people who live there and how they perceive many aspects of life. This may seem obvious, but it becomes interes

ting when we begin to study the psyche of the United States of America citizens. 

We have a mentality that we can change things if we don't agree with them. We can fight for what we believe in—after all, our forefathers left Europe to embark upon a great adventure to begin what is now "the richest and most important country". We can 

sue, we can bring people to court, we can argue, we can fight. We are offered this right and sometimes scolded if we do not use it.

Our foundation is based upon seeing a problem and fixing it ourselves and sometimes with the help of others.

Knowing this, we can take a look at how the country of Mexico was formed. 

It was conquered.

By foreigners. 

Mexicans (unlike the majority of citizens of the USA) seem to have a major distrust in politics and the gov

ernment. They respect those who have political power, but many who run for office here, gain 

much power and respect (this is the same in the USA, but there are many more rules and steps one must adhere to in order to gain an office in the USA—showing us that each potential political ruler has some desire to help the people and not just gain power).

When a new political leader comes to office, he brings 'his people' (brothers, cousins, friends) and assigns them positions of power in order to keep them close. This forces all of those people working for the previous leader to be out of a job. 

When you can see into part of the psyche of Mexico—our neighbor— we can begin to understand why their way of life is so different. Why we perceive them to not have as much ownership on what is theirs, why they might not have the same kind of patriotic pride, what a shift in power means to not just individuals but families and entire networks of people. 

We then began to talk about what a 'crisis' the immigration issue is. Okay....I'm not going to get into this because I'm not stupid :) but maybe, as a 'leader' of the world, as neighbors, as Christians, we need to be open to the possibilities that maybe there is just not a whole lot of work in the pueblos of Mexico. Maybe Mexicans go to the USA to survive—not to mooch off our economy and steal our jobs. 

I understand that there are many sides to this topic....BELIEVE ME, I just think we can stretch our imagination and LOVE our neighbors because that is what we are called to do. 

There is a movie that highlights a specific story of a Mexican woman leaving her child to find work in America so her family can live. It is called La Misma Luna (The Same Moon) and I have heard that it is beautiful. 

Maybe when we open our eyes to other possibilities, we can see the whole picture that God is painting.