These are not the droids you’re looking for.

Tonight we had a guest speaker come, my old seminary buddy Pastor James Womack. He is the senior pastor of Destiny Church, a new SBC church plant in Fort Worth that has been planted in a multi-ethnic fashion from the start. As such he was explaining their efforts to that end, with a view toward helping us toward our goals in that direction.

He was on his way while I was coaching him through town on his mobile phone. As he was turning into the neighboring parking lot, he said he was being pulled over by one of Murphy's finest. Seeing him through the window, I decided to go and meet him.

I introduced myself to the officer, handing him, my card and told him James was our guest speaker for the evening. The situation was perhaps a tad ironic, if not somewhat stereotypical.

I’m certainly not saying, and don't mean to imply, that there was any racial profiling or anything like that, but the situation was a little on the tense side of things. We had a black man going to a predominantly white church to talk about "race relations" and I would rather he not leave with a souvenir from a white police officer in our suburb.

Naturally, James couldn’t find his insurance card. He remembered afterward that the copy he normally keeps in his wallet he loaned to a buddy to whom he loaned his other car the day before.

It wasn't my intention to get him out of ticket and I didn't even use the Jedi mind trick. I didn't say, "This is not the man you're looking for. He may go about his business."

Nonetheless, the officer was gracious and said, "As a courtesy, I’m gonna let you go with a warning, but you were going a little fast."

James and I laughed about it all later, but the whole experience reminded me once again how "racial issues" still pervade human interaction and it got me thinking about divergent perspectives regarding similar experiences. Look for a post in the near future along those lines.