Over the last several years, our ability to build common ground, to create dialog across divergent communities, and to foster mutual care and love has become severely damaged. Perhaps it always was so…well not always.

We all carry intersecting identities. Some of those identities collide with others, and some collaborate with others. Complicating this are racial, gender, and other constructs created define, perhaps label, and even exclude. For instance, we are teachers in the public elementary and state college systems, we are parents, one of us is a coach, and we are both pastors. We begin to add in our friends, we find we have relationships with those who disagree with us, but we also have mutually supportive friendships with those same people when operating from other roles or identities we carry.

Yet underneath the many roles and identities, there is one common thread. We believe we are all God’s children. A story, which may not even be true, so consider it a moral fable that teaches a truthful lesson, tells of Mother Teresa and her visit in the old Soviet Union. As she met with the atheistic dictator of the Soviet Socialist Republic, she was asked by the leader, “do you not know that I am an atheist, and that we are an atheist nation?” To which Mother Teresa replied, “don’t worry. You too, are a child of God, you just may not know it yet.”

Underneath all the roles and identities we carry, at least from the standpoint of our faith, we believe that as human beings, we are all a part of God’s family. And in being human, understanding what it means to be human, we can deepen our relationships, work toward healing our broken communities and world with justice and compassion, and share in the story of God’s reconciling the world to God’s peace.

So are beginning this podcast with a simple-not-simple contemplation - What does it mean to be human?