Christian Living

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We have a pet squirrel at work.

Perhaps calling it a "pet" is a little generous, as it's basically wild, except when it comes around begging for handouts. It's quite unafraid of people, though, and will gladly eat out of someone's hand. So what do you feed a squirrel when it comes around and you're plumb out of acorns?

French fries, chicken nuggets, pizza, peanut M&Ms, cupcake icing, chocolate animal crackers (it LOVES those), Pringles, and Gatorade. Yes, the squirrel drinks Gatorade. Given the stereotype of Americans as fat and lazy, I think there's delicious irony in the way we promptly set about feeding the squirrel by and large the fattiest and unhealthiest foods we could get our hands on. Rather than treat the squirrel like a squirrel, we treated it like one of us, and wasted no time in trying to make it into one of us by feeding it the kinds of foods we like. More disturbingly, it seems that it's working. We're not sure if she's pregnant or if we've just made her fatter.

Have you ever met a Christian who was dead-set on making everyone into the exact same kind of Christian that he was? If he wakes up at the crack of dawn to pray, he says that anyone who doesn't is lazy and unspiritual. If he worships with traditional music, he criticizes everyone who uses contemporary. If he passes out gospel tracts to strangers at a gas station, he looks down his nose at everyone who doesn't.

The problem is that we as humans are not very good at handling paradoxes, but we as Christians are presented with an awful lot of them. The paradox in play here is the fact that we worship a God who is the only God, and he is very particular about his exclusive truth claims. "Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God, the Lord is one," he says in the "Shema," Deuteronomy 6:4, the most important declaration of faith in the Old Testament. Then Jesus comes along and talks about how he's the only way to God. There's a lot of exclusivity going around, a lot of teaching that there is only one God to believe and only one way to have a relationship with him.

I think this is why so many people take this idea of "one way to be" and extrapolate it out to every other area of faith. And, of course, we assume that the only right way to do things is the way that we personally do things. It really discourages me that there's such a slippery slope from truth to arrogance.

Yet the idea that people are different is quite Biblical. Paul observes that not everyone is a preacher, because if they were, who would they preach to? Not everyone is a teacher. Not everyone gets married. If the global church had a slogan, it might be "unity in diversity." But "unity in similarity" is a lot easier to preach and enforce, isn't it?

In one of my seminary classes, the professor went around the class and asked each of us to say what we wanted to do with our counseling degree. The diversity was incredible. Someone wanted to counsel missionary couples before they went into the field. Someone else wanted to work with homeless people. Someone else wanted to go to the middle east and witness to Muslim women. I didn't even know what I wanted to do, but I'm currently training to be a chaplain who works with tourism and hospitality employees. That day really opened my eyes to how big God and is plan are. He saw these needs, for missionary couples and Muslim women, and he was raising up people to meet these needs even before anyone else knew the need existed. Thank goodness some preacher somewhere didn't try to talk us all into getting "real" degrees, M.Divs, rather than the obviously-inferior counseling degrees. Oh wait, every preacher I talked to did say that.

I think we lose something great and beautiful when we look at what our fellow Christians are doing with an eye toward criticism rather than toward appreciation. And that's really what happens, isn't it, when we think that everyone should do things the way we do them. We don't admit it consciously, but we're judging their methods, probing them for flaws, seeking to compare them unfavorably to our own. I don't mean that constructive debate is bad, or that no method for, say, evangelism is better than any other. I believe there are definitely optimal and suboptimal ways of doing pretty much everything. But it takes a keen and discerning eye to tell when my way is better than someone else's, or just different, or if they're both equally successful ways of arriving at the same end, or at two totally different ends which are both beneficial.

This is basically a call for each of us to die to self, especially to the subconscious desire to see my self projected onto everyone else's self, and admit that God knew what he was doing when he made us all so different from each other. Unity in diversity. Beauty in diversity. It's a paradox indeed that God shouts repeatedly that he is the only God, that we're to worship him alone, that there's only one way to salvation - but then he creates accountants and artists, lawyers and hippies, soldiers and anti-war protesters, preachers and worship leaders and youth pastors and people who just pray a lot. We never really know what someone else's part in God's plan will be, and by attempting to steer them in another direction, we may be steering them straight away from the place God has put them and the purpose for which he has put them there.

It's really pretty crazy that such a God can even conceive of such incredible diversity, let alone create it and delight in it, but that's exactly what he does. Even as he tells us there's only one legitimate way to have a relationship with him, he gives us a million million ways to express that relationship. He takes whatever we have to give, because it's what he gave us in the first place. You can't be my mini-me, because you're already God's mini-me, and so am I, even though you and I are completely different from each other. I don't get it, either, but God does, and praise him for that.

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