There weren't too many books featuring other cultures and countries when I was growing up as an immigrant kid here in the States.

If you have a chance to see Children Of War, you can watch expert trauma counselors try to help bring healing to young people who have experienced atrocities in conflict.

Good humor pokes fun at the powerful — not the weak.

We adults all stay sixteen or so in some corner of the soul.

Books have always been my home. I ransacked the library regularly from the time we moved to the States. I read on the fire escape. I read at the dinner table. I read late into the night in my room. This unhindered foraging and feasting on books - away from controlling, condemning eyes - empowered me to identify and resist misogyny, xenophobia, shadism, and other forms of injustice.

America inevitably "brings the distant near" because apart from members of the Native Nations, all of us originated in faraway places. Sadly, proximity within the United States doesn't automatically generate friendship. But if we choose to cross borders that may at first bring discomfort and open our hearts to those who seem like strangers, I believe that we can be transformed and united as individuals, families, communities, and even as a country.

I hope and pray that despite an unhealed past full of atrocities and deep divisions in the present, God can and will make "the distant near" and a "brother of the stranger" in America's future.