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Q. Why does problem solving come up short?

A. We're too easily persuaded, wrote British mystery writer Dorothy Sayers, that "hatred, poverty, and unemployment … are problems … solved in the same manner as the Death in the Library."

Once upon a time, America had a race problem. Whites (mostly southern) were the problem. Blacks were the victims. Northern whites (with help from Martin Luther King, Jr.,) were the detectives. The Voting Rights Act and Brown v. the Board of Education were the solution.

But what's the problem in 2002? Once you've hugged a black man at a Promise Keepers gathering, how much of a race problem can be left? Let's admit it. We haven't managed to "solve" anything in our own ministries, much less in the culture as a whole.

How can we make progress?

Forget "problem" and "solution"; think life. Those of us who've persevered in efforts toward partnership across ethnic divisions have discovered that the only reason to stay in this challenging, often painful process is that it leads to life. We stay in cross-racial friendships, give up the ease of homogeneity, abandon our rights before one another because it allows us to experience as concrete what to other Christians still sounds abstract: "For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us" (Ephesians 2:14, NRSV).

Often seeking racial reconciliation and justice makes things harder. We keep doing it only because here we meet the Lord of resurrection life.

Andy Crouch is editor-in-chief of re:generation quarterly.

Adapted from: Prism (7-7/01).

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Men of Integrity.

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Prayer for the Week

Lord, make me willing to endure discomfort in order to reach out as a reconciler.

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