Obnoxious Jerks, Gas Chambers, and "Celebrating Diversity" for Real

So most all of us have had someone in our lives who we could have learned something from...only we didn't. This was because either they were obnoxious jerks or we were too insecure or some combination of all of the above.

So the question becomes, how do we relate to one another in such a way that our gifts and strengths are a blessing to one another rather than a hindrance to genuine community?

This is what drives the noble but distorted humanistic "celebrate diversity" mantra. This is good, because it was what we were meant for. This is distorted because given the problem of sin, we can't actually do this apart from Christ.

There is no salvation in one another. We cannot save ourselves, even with one another's help. We cannot ultimately cure what ails us by simply linking arms and trying to celebrate diversity. We have seen over the past one hundred years what happens when people link arms--sometimes it's good, sometimes it's gas chambers.

But this is not an "easy win" in the church either, where we talk about and celebrate gifts and sometimes that "naming" process can leave us feeling like we got the short end of the proverbial gifts stick.

So how does your giftedness bless me the way it was intended to, rather than threaten or intimidate me? A couple of thoughts:

1. We need to learn to wield our gifts and abilities graciously and humbly. It's a fundamental principle of the Land of the Ruins that hurt people hurt other people: parents who were abused as kids will tend to abuse their kids.

So if we're people who have been intimidated or belittled or who feel insecure in relation to other people's gifts, we're going to be tempted to wield our own abilities like a sword, eager to cut others down to size in order to boost ourselves up.

Instead, we must learn to wield our gifts and abilities with humility and gentleness. That starts by finding our identity and security not in those gifts or how we compare with others, but in the absolute words of love and "naming" that our Lord has spoken into our lives.

In Christ, we are sons, daughters, holy, beloved, redeemed, rescued, heirs, citizens of the kingdom of light, loved, saints, ransomed, bought with a price. Those are our names. They have nothing to do with our own abilities and everything to do with what God has done for us in Christ.

2. We need to learn to walk humbly in the presence of others and delight in the fact that the same good Father who has given us gifts has also seen fit to give our brother or sister their gifts.
This again means that our identity must be rooted in those same adjectives/nouns we just listed.

And it means fundamentally that there is no room for comparison/competition when it comes to our gifts and abilities. None. Comparison/competition is always a lose-lose situation. Either we compare and we find ourselves better and so we are proud, or we compare and we find ourselves on the short end and we end up in despair.

We can acknowledge our own and one another's giftedness--we have to do this. But we do so working from a fundamental "operating system" of grace and mercy, rooted in God, not in our own flesh which is fundamentally about comparison and competition.

Next time your feel threatened or insecure about someone around us, or your tempted to beat someone else up with your competencies, it might be good to pause and ask for help from the Lord. It might be good to ask him to remind you that your security and identity lie in something much greater than comparison and competition...and it might just help us to find that true "unity in diversity" thing that we were made for.