My husband and I recently saw the film “Hidden Figures.” The story is a good one. It is based on the true story of a team of African-American women who provided NASA with important mathematical data needed to launch the program’s first successful space missions — at least that’s the synopsis released by the producers. But let me tell you, the movie was about much more than that.

It’s a movie that gets you thinking about the wider message. I will tell you there were parts of the movie that made me uncomfortable. And rightly so. Seeing the segregated bathrooms, restaurants and schools depicted in the movie was uncomfortable because it was true. I concluded that my discomfort was born from the shame of sitting in that theatre and knowing that the actions and attitudes of people who look like me — white-skinned people — created all those obstacles and senseless inequality.

Even though I was born in 1960 and was very young during the marches and sit-ins, I still recall being part of a very segregated society.

The movie got me thinking about a lot of “what ifs.”   What if we hadn’t segregated ourselves from blacks, Latinos, or other  groups? What if we had offered open and free education to all people regardless of where they lived, how much money they made, what their accent was or what color skin they had? What if jobs, military service and positions of leadership had been open to everyone? What if we had been raised to show the same kind of excited curiosity and anticipation about getting a new ethnic neighbor as we do about taking a vacation to a foreign land for the first time? What if we had fought to be the first in line to meet and greet new ethnicities instead of fighting to force them to the back of the bus?  What if we were excited by the possibilities of racial integration rather than preparing for dangers that our fear created?

What if, instead of being intimidated and challenged by something different, we gravitated to it? What would our existence have looked like? How many great minds, like the women in the movie, did we squelch? How many solutions or explorations have gone unrealized because of racism? How many opportunities have we lost?

The movie made me think about a little relationship I had back in the same part of history as depicted in “Hidden Figures.”

It was the year I went to Girl Scout camp for the first time. I remember being a little nervous about who I would share a tent with since none of my troop mates were attending. My new tent mate was Isabell.

She was the only black girl at camp that week. Apparently she had about as much contact with white kids as I had with black.  Isabell was the first to break the silence about the fact that we were different.

“Can I touch your hair?” she said.

“My hair?” I asked.

“I never touched ‘white’ hair before,” she confessed.

I got up and sat next to her. She gently picked up some strands and slid her fingers down to the end and giggled.

“It’s smooth,” she declared. And then she asked why my hair was red.

“I don’t know anyone with red hair,” she said.

“It’s from my dad,” I reported.

Then I asked if I could touch her hair. We barraged each other with question after question. She was my favorite part of that week. I think we both felt pretty confident that we were the most worldly girls at camp that week because we each had a new experience and a new knowledge of something vastly different from ourselves and it made us pretty cool in the eyes of others.

Both the story of Isabell and the women of “Hidden Figures” could have ended very differently. And think how we can change all our stories from this day forward if we just see people as people.

Sometimes it takes a good movie to remind us that our faith calls us to treat each other as children of God — brothers and sisters. We just have to remember to do it.