Christian Living

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A Motley Crew

At the dinner table last night there was an interesting and diverse group of people. There were only six of us, but those six represented a wide range of people, personalities, places and ideas. One was very old, one very young, some rich, some not just poor, but poverty-stricken. Some laughed easily, others a bit more cautiously. We came from very diverse backgrounds, city, country and small towns in between. But the mixture was interesting and compelling, and the thought occurred to me that we had little in common except our humanity. But when one thinks about it, that last is all that’s really necessary to peace on the planet. The obvious commonality of people overrides the differences, and we get in trouble when we mistakenly judge by exterior conditions. We can look different, dress differently, speak different languages, etc., but none of that makes us any different from other folks, not really, not deep-down different anyway. The human condition is the same for all of us. We live, we get sick, we die, we have children or not, we grow old, we eat, we sleep. My, my how alike we are!! So what if we eat different kinds of food, dress differently, speak different languages: every bit of that is external and inconsequential and does not make us different in the deep sense of the word. And those people who draw strict lines of demarcation based on any external conditions are kidding themselves big-time. We seem to run the gamut from one end to the other, but when all the chips are called in, there was not a whit of difference one from the other. Because we judged strictly by what we could see, we erred hopelessly. It was, and is, what we cannot see that differentiates us one from one another. And that’s known only to God, both here and hereafter.

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