Celebrate life’s insistence on diversity
March 5, 2009 (Thursday)
Music is a wonderful thing. Working with the same set of notes, composers have created music of many kinds. Ever think about the fact that Rock and Roll uses the same notes that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony uses? The variations of timing, harmony, volume, etc. etc. give almost unlimited freedom to the composer to create music different from that of others. There seems to be no end to the variations. There are, in fact, many different kinds of music, but all use the same notes.
Variety can be seen in other ways. How many colors are there? We were taught that there are three prime colors: red, yellow and blue. White and black are combined colors or the lack thereof. The combinations of these colors produce colors of many names. The basic color spectrum shows one color fading into the next. How many colors in a sunset? Count fast, because before you can name them, they change right before your eyes. A seemingly infinite variety of colors paints the sky, but really only three, steadfastly intent on combining with each other in ways that dazzle human perception.
This spring many will take tours of the highways, viewing the colorful wildflowers. They will appear soon, in colors that take your breath away, covering the hills and fields of the countryside. God will defy all our color charts and piece together, in magnificently beautiful patterns, a multitude of flowers of different kinds, and no one will have the temerity to say God does not know what He’s doing.
It seems that variety is the stuff of life that makes living enjoyable and worthwhile. When it comes to people, behold the different kinds: they look different from each other, speak their own way, walk in their own style, live their lives their way. Thus it was meant to be. We want humans to be unified in some ways, but we welcome, we celebrate, diversity. Let’s get to know the people who are different from us, if we can. We’ll be glad we did.