Jellybeans

So, what’s your favourite jellybean colour?

Now, imagine you’ve just won the Guessing Competition, and you are presented with the biggest jar of jellybeans you’ve ever seen.  1,800 jellybeans!  And they’re all yours!   The weird thing is, in the jar every jellybean is a different colour.  They all look different.  You didn’t know so many jellybean colours existed.  But let’s be fair – you get to eat the other colours too, not only your favourite.  The trouble is being able to even find your favourite colour.

As you taste the delights of your victory you realise there’s something odd happening.  All the jellybeans look different, but they are all good.  Different colours.  Different flavours.  Each of them good.  Even the one that was squished out of shape and it’s difficult to work out which colour it was supposed to be.

At one level or another, we all live in community with others, and we’re all different.  Your community might be your family.  Your church.  Your town.  Wherever it might be, we’re a bunch of jellybeans sharing the same space.  Perhaps it’s just natural to choose our favourites.  But I wonder what our community might become like if we took the challenge to find the good in all of them?

I might already be in trouble with the people of Kariong, calling them a bunch of jellybeans.  Why not go to the next level?  What if ‘love your neighbour as you love yourself’ became ‘love all the jellybeans as much as the others’?  Even the ones that look squished or different.