Ramadan Visit

      Last night Martha and I with eight of our church friends attended a Ramadan Iftar dinner at the Raindrop Turkish House in San Antonio. The dinner prepared for non-Islamic guests was an excellent interfaith opportunity to meet and have fellowship with Islamic citizens as they broke their day-long fast. We learned from and experienced with them some of their cultural and religious traditions and rituals. We saw first-hand how helpful it can be to commune across the barriers that have created misunderstanding among those of us raised in the West.

     In a recent blog I spoke of my Baptist identity and especially treasured the part of my background and training that values cultural and religious diversity.  It goes back for me at least to four years old with my very Baptist mother teaching me to sing: "Jesus loves the little children; all the children of the world' red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight."  So the Baptist heritage I treasure and try to practice is not the narrow kind that operate on the belief that all the other people of the world are not precious to him.

     For the last eighteen years we have enjoyed associating with a neighborhood Lutheran  Church that practices radical hospitality.  Hence the outreach to this Islamic group.