Well Aloha and good morning. Welcome to the Birch Town Daily for Tuesday, June 2nd.

My name is Jaron Oda and I lead the youth here at Birch Town Church. In this past Saturday

morning, I took a walk through downtown after the first night of the protests for George

Floyd. And after walking through the ravaged and honestly pretty severely damaged downtown

area of Portland, I read a piece of graffiti on one of the pillars in Pioneer Square.

And it said, this is your society. I didn't take a photo of it unfortunately because the worker

was already cleaning it, but I wish I did thinking back on it. But anyway, after sifting through

the immense damage and reading all of the various graffiti and messages and statements,

that phrase stuck with me the most. The phrase, this is your society.

Woke me out of the slumber of my individuality. You know, the sense that I'm not black or white,

therefore I'm not affected in this moment. Error. I am created in the image of God. And therefore

I am witnessing the atrocities of black lives who are created in the image of God. You see, you and I

live in a society where the Imago Day is still being ravaged by racism and humiliation and violence

and murder and even silence. And guess what? You and I don't get to escape from the way God made us.

Richard Plass and James Cofield in their wonderful book, The Relational Soul,

state that we were created with this relational likeness and we long for relational connection

because God exists in a relationship of love. God designed us to be for another and God designed us

to receive from another. We are created to be interconnected. We cannot be unaffected by injustice

particularly as followers of Jesus. And 1 Corinthians 12 21 through 26. Paul says, but God has put

the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it so that there should be no

division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for one another. If one part

suffers, every part suffers with it. If one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

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