If we are to have unity in our country, we need to understand the story of our neighbors.

That was the message Dr. Walter Frazier, director of Grace Christian Counseling Center, delivered to people attending Thursday’s National Day of Prayer Community Prayer Breakfast at Bypass Church of Christ.

After giving a brief history of his life, Frazier asked the audience to think about their neighbor seated next to them.

“What do you know about them? What can you say is their story? What background do they have?,” Frazier said.

“I think it’s important to remember as we look at each other to look inside yourself and remember your own story.

“In our world today, there’s a tendency, especially in our politics, to put people in a dichotomous setting. You’re one or the other, and a lot of assumptions are made about you based on which one you are. Whether or not you advocate abortion; whether or not you support the LGBT community; whether or not you believe in gun rights; whether or not you support Donald Trump.

“We get stuck into one or two of a lot of things, but my life is a lot more complicated than that.”

Frazier introduced the term “intersectionality,” a concept that describes someone’s characteristics and recognizes that while in some areas in their life they experience privilege, while in some areas of their life they are not privileged, and maybe even oppressed.

“In many ways, we all may know what it’s like to privileged,” he said, “But then there are other aspects of life that many of us experience that may put us in a position that we’re not privileged, our race, our ability or disability, our employment status.

“And as you think about your own experience and recognize that I too experience intersectionality in some ways, you have think about my story; my identity is far more complicated than maybe identity politics puts me.”

The catalyst for experiencing unity in the community, Frazier said, is for the church to lead the way in helping people recognize that every person not only is unique in the eyes of God, they are God’s creation.

“That person has a story that is far greater than what their skin color tells you, far greater than the uniform that they wear, far greater than the status that they have in their position of power or their lack of a position of power,” he said.

When someone looks at an individual, he said, they need to look at them through the lens of remembering their own intersectionality.

“I think that brings us an opportunity to come together and come closer. When we get a diverse group together, there is a lot more opportunity for processing and getting to know each other and working for growth, and well-being happens because we learn from persons who come from a different experience.”

And unity, Frazier said, is best achieved with a diverse group of people where they begin recognizing their own differences and then learning what they have in common.

“We like to identify ourselves as being in opposition to something, but we need to remember our commonality,” he said.

And when people pray for unity, he added, “Ask God to open our ears and our eyes to the intersectionality of each person we encounter, to open our hearts to recognize our own intersectionality, especially in circumstances where we feel compelled to identify ourselves with one particular characteristic and assume that everybody else who disagrees with that is something else.”