The Power of Celebrating and Honoring Our God-Given Diversity
In December 2019, our oldest son introduced us to his fiancé. Her three daughters hugged me saying, “Lolli! Lolli!” Just like that, I became a grandmother of multi-cultural and multi-ethnic children. During our visit, the youngest showed me her sister’s doll, which was Black. She was sad because her sister wasn’t willing to trade for her doll, which was white. She admitted that she didn’t know why she thought her sister’s doll was “so beautiful.” I assured her that both dolls, just like her and her sisters, were “so beautiful.” Then, I told her about my first picture book. Different Like Me, like all my picture books, includes children with and without disabilities celebrating our differences and our sameness as God’s beautifully diverse image-bearers.
I learned that a bully said my granddaughter couldn’t be related to her sisters because they were white and she was Black. She said that she was glad there were finally other brown people in her family. Her eight-year-old mind didn’t understand the generations of biases, stereotypes, prejudice, colorism, and racism behind those words. Sadly, the bully’s comment made my youngest granddaughter doubt she belonged in her own family.
I told her that the child who said those things must not know that God made and uses melanin, which is brown, to design the perfect skin color ̶ from the darkest ebony to the lightest ivory ̶ for each of His beloved image-bearers. I said that she and her sisters were all wonderfully, marvelously brown, then promised to write a picture book celebrating every spectacular shade of brown God made.
As I prayerfully wrote and edited Wonderfully, Marvelously Brown, the Holy Spirit revealed that I was still struggling with insecurities regarding my light complexion and the fear of rejection and not belonging. I’m Mexican American with immigrant parents and grandparents. I grew up in the tension between assimilation and the Chicano Movement, with a strong belief in but no relationship with God. My parents forced me to stop speaking Spanish and enrolled me into kindergarten using the English version of my Spanish middle name. They insisted I would have a “better life” if I passed as white. However, I was only eight years old when a group of white students heard me speaking Spanish with my friends, called us “wetbacks,” and told us to go back to where we came from.
Over time I learned that some white people treated us with love and respect, while others wanted us all to go back to Mexico even if we were born in the United States. I began resenting my parents for erasing the evidence of our culture from our home. The pantry remained the only sanctuary for our heritage, since history had proven Mexican food was more acceptable than Mexican people. I cringed when my parents worked for hours making tamales for the same white people who justified racist comments with, “It was just a joke.”
My mother taught migrant students as an ESL para educator while I struggled with insecurity that bloomed into self-hatred. I began making distinctions between Mexicans born in America like me ̶ Chicanos ̶ and the migrant families who drifted in and out of our community. At eighteen, though, I embraced every aspect of my culture, became intentional about honoring other cultures, and spoke loudly against racial injustice. I legally reclaimed the name with Aztec roots on my birth certificate, then left for college.
Even there, I was not Mexican nor American enough. My light skin didn’t make me acceptable, either. People asked, “What are you?” then rejected my answer by saying, “You are not Mexican. You don’t look Mexican. You don’t sound Mexican.” Some guessed my ethnicity, as if competing on a gameshow.
My turmoil continued, even after I met my husband in 1992. He grew up in the Black Church but had no personal relationship with Christ, so we didn’t attend services. We raised our sons around our multi-ethnic and multi-cultural extended families and friends. We taught them Black history year-round and enrolled our youngest into a Spanish immersion program. I spoke Spanish and English at home. I identified myself as Mexican, not Mexican American, Chicana, Hispanic, or Latina. Then, I surrendered my life to Jesus in 2001 and discovered my identity was rooted in Christ.
As I prayerfully studied the unerring and unchanging God-breathed words of Scripture, the Holy Spirit revealed that our God-given cultures and ethnicities are a part of God’s plan to reach the nations. The traits that make us diverse equip us to contribute to the Body of Christ and are meant to be celebrated not erased, ignored, or deemed inferior. I denounced teaching that skimmed over or minimized the value of diversity in God’s kingdom or the need for justice and righteousness in the world.
Around that time, an adult asked my kindergartener, “What are you?” and an older student called him a racial slur. As a new believer, I didn’t know how to respond in a way that would honor Jesus. So, I prayed, wrote Different Like Me, and started attending Christian writers’ conferences in 2010. During one conference, after declaring that I was “one of a few Latina authors in the Christian market,” an industry professional said, “But it’s not like you’re really Mexican.” Later, a woman glared at me and said that my name was rooted in paganism and represented savages that murdered babies. Before and during conferences I prayed I would honor Jesus. Though I often didn’t respond to comments like these, I’m confident my face showed what I was thinking. Oh, how I need Jesus!
Then, in 2015, God opened doors. A Black editor I met in 2010, who has become one of my mentors, invited me to serve with a diverse team of Christian writers through Our Daily Bread Ministries. I also met my agent, a white man with a passion for reaching the global church and honoring diverse voices. In 2018, my current agent from the same agency and one of their more experienced authors, both white sisters in Christ, helped me strengthen my proposal and celebrated as I signed a contract for Different Like Me.
After God began using my first devotional, Waiting for God, to minister to readers around the world in 2019, I began mentoring an immigrant from India who encouraged Christians to live as foreigners on earth because our citizenship is in heaven. She prayed with me after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, when I asked God to make Different Like Me a healing balm for families who were hurting, divided by racial tension, and frustrated with inequity and the
injustice of systemic and institutional racism.
Longing to encourage unity while celebrating our God-given diversity, I lamented when Christians claimed to be colorblind “like God.” This mindset, which assumes God doesn’t truly see the people He made, is as damaging as the stereotyping, biases, and prejudice that fuel colorism, racism, and the false sense of superiority or inferiority based on skin color.
The song “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” written by Clarence Herbert Woolston (1856-1927), got it right and wrong. Jesus loves all His image-bearers but not one has skin tones that are “red and yellow, black and white.” Throughout history, people used those descriptors in derogatory ways and to justify oppression. We are all wonderfully, marvelously different shades of brown, a color the writer did not include in the original lyrics.
I had no idea how much I was struggling until 2021. When I wrote Wonderfully, Marvelously Brown, my friends from India and Korea helped me with translations for the illustrations. However, I italicized and considered deleting the Spanish words to make the content more acceptable and universal. While rejoicing over our God-designed diversity, I had settled for being invisible and assimilated for acceptance. My editor, whose family is from
Nigeria, encouraged me to keep everything God gave me and to stop apologizing for my voice.
In 2023, through a friendship with a woman of mixed ethnicities, I became a member of a diverse group of Christian women who use writing and speaking as tools for ministry. In October 2024, they rallied around me as I praised God for my multi-ethnic and multi-cultural friends and
family (especially our seven grandbabies), and celebrated the release of Wonderfully, Marvelously Brown.
After living over half a century, I’d like to say the struggle is over. However, this Kingdom work is complex, ongoing, and not always well-received in the church. While the Bible affirms that we can’t love God if we don’t love people, Christians are too often silent about the unloving sins of colorism and racism. But we can’t fulfill the Great Commission while living out the Greatest Commandment if we don’t refute the lies that divide us with the biblical truth God designed to unite us. When we celebrate and honor our God-given diversity, every wonderfully, marvelously brown image-bearer will know that they belong in God’s family. Then, the church will grow in love for God and others.
Xochitl (So-Cheel) E. Dixon, a disabled Mexican author and speaker, serves Jesus with her beautifully diverse family and her service dog, Callie. She contributes to Our Daily Bread and God Hears Her, and is the author of the “Choose to Change” feature in Tyndale’s NLT Go Bible for Kids (2024), Waiting for God: Trusting Him for the Answers to Every Prayer (2019, 2025), What Color is God’s Love? (2024), Wonderfully, Marvelously Brown (2024), and the 2021 ECPA Christian Book Award Finalist, Different Like Me (2020). With a passion for spiritual growth, discipleship, and prayer, she connects with readers at www.xedixon.com.
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