Oh, dear God,

First, I know not everyone believes in You. I know just because they don’t, doesn’t make them any less than me. The same goes for those who look to You in a different way than I do. We are all the same, but unique. Contradictory for sure, but that’s the point, right?

What kind of place would this be if we were all exactly the same or too unique that we couldn’t relate to one another?

Imagine if beets were the only food, and everyone loved them, and everyone ate beets all day and never complained. You knew this would never work. I would’ve been the freak and starved. You figured I’d rather die of starvation and shame than to follow everyone and eat beets when there is chocolate on the planet. I’m guessing this is why You initiated that freewill clause. You didn’t want people to die needlessly because they blindly followed everyone and ate beets and were unhappy and eventually checked out. You made life so I could say no to beets and live, happily.

Our sameness and uniqueness is, as contradictory as it may sound, what makes this world work and not work. It works when we use these qualities correctly. We shouldn’t use our uniqueness to shut others out or our sameness in that way either.

I’m guessing you made both of these qualities as a means of celebration. There is glory to be had in both sameness and uniqueness. Someone doesn’t like chocolate, yeah more for me! Another loves those beets, here have mine!

Problems do arise though when we both want chocolate and can’t share or can’t understand why anyone would love a disgusting beet. (It’s not just a beet, but a disgusting beet.) We’re mean about our different likes.

We gather chocolate people together, disregarding sharing habits or lack of, to band together against beet people. The beet people then band their fellow beet lovers together against the chocolate lovers.

What both groups should be doing is looking past beets and chocolate to celebrate the fact that both chocolate and beets are food. Sameness and uniqueness work in this context, a celebration of two different things, but food just the same. (I’ll not get into nutrition aspects here.) That would complicate things, which does happens in the real world, but criminy can’t we ever takes things and simplify. We complicate life beyond reason.

I also see why you’ve given everything a contradiction. How else would we know the blessing of day without night or the blessing of night without day?  I get it. The challenges of this world aren’t sameness and uniqueness, but respecting one another’s choices and perspectives.

Hey, thanks for listening.