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Key Bible Verse: We loved you so much that we gave you not only God's Good News but our own lives, too (1 Thessalonians 2:8).
Bonus Reading: 1 Thess. 2:17-20

It was no accident that Republican Jack Kemp and Democrat Bill Bradley were for years two of their parties' most passionate voices for racial healing. Both had backgrounds in professional sports—Kemp played with the Buffalo Bills, while Bradley spent ten years in the NBA's black world—where racial discrimination became a personal issue in friendships with black teammates. "I couldn't face my friends Ernie Ladd, Cookie Gilchrist, or Tippy Day or all the black football players I know and lived with and lost and won with, if I weren't their voice in the cabinet," said Kemp when he was HUD secretary.

Kemp and Bradley found common ground with blacks on the playing fields of professional sports. Finding common interests is a good starting point for building interracial friendships.

Racial reconciliation shouldn't begin with a debate over affirmative action and quotas—or theology. It's about getting to know names and faces. Build relationships and share in your new friends' concerns for their families and communities. Go into their neighborhood. Visit their church. Let their experience speak to your life.

—Chris Rice in More Than Equals

A stereotype I used to accept collapsed when I got to know _____.

In the long run, there is not much discrimination against superior talent. It constrains men to recognize it.

—Carter G. Woodson (historian, 20th century)

Adapted from: More Than Equals (Intervarsity, 2000) with permission.

For your convenience, More Than Equals is available in the ChristianityToday.com bookstore.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Men of Integrity magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Men of Integrity.

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Prayer for the Week

Dear Father: Help us, without ignoring our differences, to achieve equality by realizing that we each offer something the other person needs.

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