This is why a Christian woman wears hijab on every Monday

Martha DeVries got tired of hearing rants against Muslims. The 47-year-old high school counselor in North Kansas City, Missouri, is a practicing Christian — a self-described "follower of Jesus" who attends a Baptist church — and she decided that watching anti-Muslim rhetoric from the sidelines wasn't good enough.

"I've just gotten very tired of hearing so many negative things, like Donald Trump's 'let's not let Muslim immigrants into the United States' and the scare on Syrian refugees," she said. So beginning last December, she started wearing a hijab every Monday, a practice she planned to continue until the end of the school year in May.

"I live in a pretty interesting community," she says of North Kansas City. "We have a lot of immigrants living close to the high school where I work" — and when the weather's nice, the local park "looks like the United Nations."

She was also nudged by a sermon her pastor delivered on making a difference. When people noticed the headscarf and asked whether she was having a bad hair day, she had her answer ready: "I'm trying to walk in someone else's shoes. And I'm tired of people saying persecutory things about Muslims."

Her husband, Mike DeVries, a part-time youth pastor, backed the gesture. "It's really easy to be a Christian in the United States," she said. "What's a headscarf? It's three yards of material. That shouldn't separate me from someone whose humanity is so much like mine."

Her story was reported by Religion News Service.