“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
Matthew 7:1-2
I have a brutal question for you: Do you judge the unvaccinated? Honestly, I judge them all the time. After 1.5 years of living with this vicious pandemic, I still cannot understand how someone would willingly choose to be unvaccinated. Thousands of Covid vaccines go discarded everyday in the U.S. because people still refuse to take them. What’s even more incredulous is that some of my co-workers at the hospital are still unvaccinated. The HOSPITAL! Where we’ve seen hundreds of patients die from Covid. When I hear about some of these things, all sorts of explicit pejoratives run through my mind… most of which are inappropriate for this email.
Yet, when I actually sat down and asked some of my colleagues who chose not to get vaccinated, I became a bit more sympathetic to their perspective. I know, right? There are probably some of you who are judging me right now as you’re reading this. But let me give you one example. I have a Black male co-worker who educated me on the fraught history Black Americans have with vaccines; some “vaccines” have been used as poison to kill some Black Americans pre-Civil War. Also, newly abducted slaves were forced to take these strange shots so that they could be sold at higher price at slave auctions. Here’s a helpful article to help understand how vaccines can be viewed as medical colonialism.
I have no personal negative history with vaccines, so I had no reason to hesitate getting the Covid vaccine. So who am I to judge? Furthermore, I probably do many things that other people would not understand. Actually, I’m 100% certain I do some strange things that people would not get. I deserve to be judged just as much as the next person. I am grateful that a God who has every right to judge and condemn me chose to forgive, love, and embrace me instead.
