FORGIVING OUR DIFFERENCES
Our differences, however much they may frustrate us and tax our patience at times, are not a crime, a sin, or indeed (most times) even anyone’s fault. We don’t need to blame someone, be angry at someone, or resent someone because he or she is different than we are, no matter how much those differences separate us, frustrate us, and try our patience and understanding.
We resent others, especially those closest to us in our families, in our churches, and in our places of work, because they are different than we are, as if they were to blame for those differences. Funny, how we rarely reverse that and blame ourselves.
Incompatibility within families, church circles, and professional circles, rarely helps produce respect and friendship. The opposite is true. Our differences generally become a source of division, anger, resentment, bitterness, and recrimination. We positively blame the other person for the incompatibility as if it was a moral fault or a willful separation.
God and nature, it would appear, do not believe in simplicity, uniformity, blandness, and sameness. We aren’t born into this world off conveyor-belts like cars coming off a factory line. The infinite combination of accidents, circumstance, chance, and providence that conspire to make up our specific and individual DNA is too complex to ever be calculated or even concretely imagined.
But blame isn’t the proper verb here, even if in our frustrations with our differences we feel that we need to blame someone. God and nature shouldn’t be blamed for providing us with so much richness, for setting us into a world with so much color and variety, and for making our own personalities so deep and complex. How boring life would be if we weren’t forever confronted with novelty, variety, and difference. How boring the world would be if everything were the same color, if all flowers were of one kind, and if all personalities were the same as ours.
We would pay a high price for the easy peace and understanding that would come from that uniformity!
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