Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins.”

• Mark 2:22

The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “When anyone has a swelling or a rash or a shiny spot on their skin that may be a defiling skin disease, they must be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons who is a priest. The priest is to examine the sore on the skin, and if the hair in the sore has turned white and the sore appears to be more than skin deep, it is a defiling skin disease. When the priest examines that person, he shall pronounce them ceremonially unclean.

• Leviticus 13:1-3

Do not stare at me because I am dark, because I am darkened by the sun. My mother’s sons were angry with me and made me take care of the vineyards; my own vineyard I had to neglect.

• Song of Songs 1:6

Miriam and Aaron began to talk against Moses because of his Cushite wife, for he had married a Cushite.
…
The anger of the Lord burned against them, and he left them.
When the cloud lifted from above the tent, Miriam’s skin was leprous—it became as white as snow. Aaron turned toward her and saw that she had a defiling skin disease, and he said to Moses, “Please, my lord, I ask you not to hold against us the sin we have so foolishly committed. Do not let her be like a stillborn infant coming from its mother’s womb with its flesh half eaten away.”
So Moses cried out to the Lord, “Please, God, heal her!”

• Numbers-12:1, 9-13

I had a comment dialogue with SlimJim, of The Domain for Truth, quite some time ago.  I characterized my wife’s fight for “equality” in a white-dominated world in that she could pass as white, with a nice tan.  Then, after the vitiligo completely bleached her face white, you had to see the leopard spots on her arms to know what her original skin color was.

But this comment was disingenuous, and I have apologized for the remark.  I hereby want to set the record straight.

First, I have written how I first met my wife and thought of her as an exotic person.  Her voice was a voice I would love to listen to forever.  Her darker than average skin was interesting, a nice dark tan.  Actually, of the five sisters, she only had one sister who had a lighter skin tone.  My wife painted her eyes with liner to produce “cat eyes.”  That accentuated her eyes that were not completely round, but not exactly almond shaped either.

My wife wanted someone to call her beautiful, but she was often called “cute.”  She hated that, but she was cute in appearance, personality, the stories she told, the way she attracted people to herself, etc.  She was a conversation magnet.  People wanted to talk to her, and they wanted to hear what she had to say.  And she had a lot of interesting things to say.  She never shied away from her heritage or the island, Java, which she called home until about the age of six years old.  And she had more memories from those years than most people have.

My wife could say a few words in an Indonesian dialect, but she was forced out of the country before they formalized the present Indonesian language.  Thus, many of the words she knew became lost in translation, so to speak.  She could also speak a variety of languages, but not nearly as many or as fluently as her father.  But then again, most of her schooling was in the U.S.A.

After she got out of the Air Force, she went to southern California to “find herself,” having been abused while in the military and basically a shell of what she had been when she enlisted.  She always met people and had friends.  She walked across the border with some friends for a day of fun in Tijuana, Mexico.  When she walked back into the U.S.A. she was pulled out of line.  She claimed to be Mexican, but the border guard did not buy that.  As she played games with him, knowing she had been called a Mexican when she lived in El Paso, Texas, and a Cajun when she lived in Port Arthur, Texas, she wanted to see what the border guard would guess.  He said she was not Hawaiian, but he would put her somewhere further west of there in the islands of the Pacific.  My wife was impressed, admitting that she was a naturalized citizen of the United States, and she was originally from Indonesia.

That kind of recognition only happened a couple of times after we met.  It was more often that we got the classic line, “You are not from around here, are you?”  My wife took all those in stride.

But with the Air Force blatant, oppressive abuse by the LTC (Lt. Colonel) Head of Nursing that was never identified as “racial,” my wife had a very odd thing happen at the hospital in South Carolina where she briefly worked.

As I said, she never shied from saying what her heritage was.  When she first went into the nurse’s lounge, she was asked what her ethnicity was.  She said she was Eurasian.  One of the black technicians in the room said, “Funny you say that.  I’m Eurasian too!”  The woman was decidedly African in ethnicity.  She just wanted to put my wife down.  The Latin technician, with Spanish surname, ran the nurse’s lounge by her vicious vindictive nature.  She latched onto the mockery.  None of them wanted to know that a Eurasian was a blend of European and Asian ancestors.  There are many fantastically attractive celebrities who are Eurasian, and you might be surprised if you searched for “Famous Eurasian Women” or something similar.  The abuse did not stop with that one day.  They would see her in the halls and say, “There goes the Eurasian” and then laugh.

My wife found refuge by volunteering for the next surgical case, but that was the desire of the Latin unofficial commander of the nurse’s lounge.  She could get paid to do nothing but drink coffee all day, and she could keep my wife out of the nurse’s lounge.  The hospital politics were done in the nurse’s lounge, and if you avoided going there, you had no idea what was about to happen.  My wife would spend an eight-hour shift on her feet, on a concrete floor, and come home exhausted.  She would just have the food prepared by the time I got home, and then she crashed.

One day, she had to leave early.  Our younger son was deemed unfit to start first grade, and after we begged the school to accept him, he was not only doing all his work perfectly, he would do so quickly and then help the other students.  This was disruptive, so the teacher asked for a parent-teacher one-on-one.  Since she could leave work thirty minutes early, she volunteered.  Since I worked an hour’s drive away, I would basically have to take off a half day.  That day though, the head of surgery scheduled her for an orthopedic surgery that could take more than a full shift.  My wife kept reminding them she had to leave a half hour early, but the doctors had no trouble and she finished the case, washed up afterwards, sterilized the surgical room, and then, only fifteen minutes before quitting time, she clocked out.

The next day, she arrived, and her badge did not work.  She went in through the main entrance and confronted the personnel department.  She had been fired for leaving early the day before, “leaving in the middle of a case” – a blatant and provable lie.  She was so distraught that she could not drive home.  She called me and while she waited in the main lobby for me to drive the hour to the hospital and then drive her home, one of the nurses who knew she was railroaded, ripped the page out of the logbook and gave it to her.  There was a note that she had to leave thirty minutes early in the margin.  It had been approved.  The only variance was that she worked fifteen minutes beyond that time to ensure that the surgical room was ready for the next patient.  She never fought the dismissal.  It brought on a return of the PTSD created by the military experience – something she was denied benefits for.

What she had not done was visit the nurse’s lounge where the abuse had started, and where, through talking to co-workers that liked her, the Latin unofficial lounge commander had lied to the head of nursing, saying that my wife was the cause of all problems in the department, echoed by the woman who was still claiming to be Eurasian.  The nursing supervisor fired her with no reason for having done so, based on lies.  My wife could have stemmed the lies if she ever took a break in the nurse’s lounge.  But now, with the worker being fired, everything fell apart in the surgical wing of the hospital.  Those who never did any work were found to be incompetent.  The nursing manager was the next one fired.  Oddly, the Latin unofficial commander of the nurse’s lounge might still be there, but she would be past retirement age by now.

The other case of abuse had started since before I ever married my wife.  My mother taught us to respect people of all colors, but she never expected me to marry someone who was not white.  She abused me for even thinking about it.  She abused my wife, openly.  She would say, “Your children will look like circus freaks.” And other such nice things.  She called my wife black.

Then, after the vitiligo started, my mother spit out “Only black people get vitiligo!”  My mother forgot that her own daughter, my older sister had a bad case of it, mostly seen in her face.  But as my wife’s case fully developed, her entire face went white, except for a little around the eyes.  In seeing this development, she sat with my parents and turned to my Dad.  She said, “Granddad, you always wanted to have a white daughter-in-law and now you have one.”  My Dad doubled over laughing.  He secretly loved my wife, in an appropriate way for a father-in-law to show love.  My mother huffed.  Her face turned crimson, and she stormed from the room.

But I say all this as outliers.  I may have noticed my wife’s exotic features when I first met her, but afterwards, she was the woman that I loved.  I did not see color.

Since we all are descendants from Adam, we are all part of the human race.  The recent discoveries in Y-chromosome show that dark skin color is scattered among all three sons of Noah to the point of skin color being meaningless when talking about DNA.  The Bible never mentions “dark” and “skin” in the same verse.  You can say the same for “color” and “skin” or “black” and “skin.”  The Scripture from Song of Songs above might be the only reference to skin color. The love interest had to work in the vineyard and her skin darkened as a result. Many places in the world use pale skin for a woman as a sign of affluence due to the woman not having to work outside. I have a feeling this is why Solomon used this reference, not relating to a permanent skin color at all. It is our sinful nature that brings those things to the surface on both sides of the argument.  As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his “I have a dream” speech, we should be judged by our character instead of our skin color.  And I see a lot of poor character shown in just about all the colors of skin these days.  But there is love shown by all those colors also.

The only mention of “skin” in the New Testament is in three verses where Jesus reminds his students that you cannot put new wine in old wine skins, or the wine will burst the skins.  Nothing in the New Testament about human skin of any color.

In the Old Testament, the largest amount of references to “skin” is in talking about infectious skin diseases and how to treat them.

But then, we see what everyone thinks is an example of racism when Moses’ authority is questioned by his own brother and sister, just because Moses’ wife is a Cushite.  It is thought that the Cushites, descendants of Ham, were the African, dark black people.  I think recent DNA studies might draw questions to that thought, but maybe…  Let’s say they are right.  How does God handle this rebellion due to racism, of sorts?  Miriam gets leprosy.  Moses begs God to cure her.  God does, but according to those laws in Leviticus about infectious skin disease (the important reference to “skin”), she had to be isolated for seven days.  They made a dwelling for her, and the entire Israelite camp did not move for those seven days.  They did not leave the “bigot” behind.  I doubt of they called her such names. She was not cancelled.  But she learned in a painful way that God did not like that type of hatred.

So, after years and years of side glances and open persecution just for the color of her skin, my wife started filling out forms saying she was white.  With the vitiligo, who was to know?  Seeing the photo above, taken after my wife’s vitiligo turned her face white, you can tell her mother has Asian characteristics, but that does not define the person.  I loved both of those ladies in the photograph.

But I loved my wife for the person who she was beneath the skin.  And God loved her and elected her to be in His kingdom for what was in her heart.  She could have been bright purple and those things would still be true.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.