A Love That Widens

Over the past few years, I’ve been being drawn to the richness of cultural diversity more than ever before. These colors, languages, wisdom traditions, and ways of seeing the world stretch far beyond my own upbringing.

Maybe that longing was planted in me early, growing up in Tulsa in the 60s, where the wounds of racial tension still lingered in the air. Even though the Tulsa Race Massacre had taken place decades before, its shadow remained, quiet, unspoken, but present. Some of that pain was passed down in subtle ways, shaping how communities saw one another, how fear traveled, how silence settled in.

And yet, God has been healing those inherited wounds in me. Slowly, gently, through encounters with people whose stories are different from mine, through friendships that cross cultural lines, through learning to see the world with wider eyes. It feels like God has been expanding my heart, teaching me to trust that His love is always larger than the divisions we inherit.

One of the places I’ve found unexpected solace is in ancient Chinese wisdom. Lao Tzu’s words have become a kind of quiet companion:

“The supreme good is like water, which nourishes all things without trying to.
It is content with the low places that people disdain. Thus it is like the Tao.”

There is something profoundly healing in that image—water moving toward the low places, nourishing without effort, offering itself freely. It reminds me that God’s grace often flows where pain has pooled, where history has wounded, where hearts have been overlooked. And it reminds me that humility, choosing the low places, are often the path toward reconciliation.

Cultural diversity feels like that water to me now: nourishing, gentle, quietly transformative. When I listen deeply to another culture’s wisdom, when I honor the beauty of someone else’s story, something in me is softened. Something old is healed. Something new is born.

Today, I’m sitting with the truth that God’s love shines equally, on the cedar and the daisy, on every people and every culture, on every story great and small. And I’m grateful for the way that love keeps widening my world.