The Virtue of Difference

a devotional for spring

Photo by daniel plan on Unsplash

Thank you for joining us! Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:

On last week’s devotional, Upturned Palms, TBollen commented:

“As one of the pale children of the north, I've always felt a slight disconnect from the cultural significance of Palm Sunday. Leave it to you to bring that connection closer to home! I guess the related message is, worship how you can, where you are, with what you have.”

Worship how you can, where you are, with what you have! Perfectly put! Thank you, TBollen!

If you want to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!

Now, on with this week’s devotional…

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flowers gather
(a riotous congregation)
beside the paths and roadsides
of the season,

they raise their purple
(yellow, pink, white)
faces to the spring-soaked sun

leaves uplifted
in fervent prayer;

the Artist
who paints their petals by hand
touches each
with fingers of dew

and the wind
is full
of their praise

and millions upon millions
of their secret
(God-breathed)
names. 

Have you ever spent much time studying a patch of flowers? It’s remarkable to realize that no two are identical, even among blooms in the same family.

Violets, apple blossoms, tulips, daffodils, dandelions…each have variations and shapes that differentiate one from the other, slight tonal differences in the colors, and different numbers of petals. No two flowers are alike.

In fact, if there’s one thing we can learn about God by studying nature, it’s that difference—variation—is good. It’s essentially a virtue. Sameness is unlikely in creation. In fact, it seems impossible.

Humans seek—and often create—sameness because we think sameness is safe and does not inspire conflict. Sameness is easy to categorize; it does not challenge or provoke. A field of sunflowers can look like a blur of green and gold to us from a distance. A hive of bees is just a swarm of matching stripes. But if we were to look closer, we would understand that our Artist-God is not content to surround us with the safety of sameness. Each sunflower is different, as is each honeybee. The bark of a tree, the patterns on bird feathers, the shapes in the clouds. No two alike. A world of complex and complicated patterns, like fingerprints.

So it is with each human soul.

Uniqueness is strength, when we choose to share it with one another. Differences can create conflict, yes, but only when we expect to smooth our differences into uniformity.

This week, what would it take for us to recognize difference for the virtue it is? To look down the line of flowers and see only the beauty in our neighbor’s petals?

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