There's recently been a wave of friend requests on Facebook that have involved me.  A few have been from old friends, but many (most?) have been from new co-workers.  I think it's fair to say that everyone in our little shoe box of a store works well together.  I'm sure that some people are closer than others, but in general, I feel a sense of camaraderie and fun.  I'd even go so far as to say that I am friends with some of them (I don't work with some of them ever because of my bizarro scheduling).  So, here's what's striking: when I look at the Facebook profiles of these folks, I can't help but notice that we are all so different from one another.  There are a couple of people who I can relate to pretty closely, actually, and that has a lot to do with our beliefs and our personalities, but there are others who, in many ways, I could point to as my polar opposites.  And yet, we all have a blast together.  We are united over coffee.  

I have been in these circumstances on a number of occasions.  Every time I've worked at Starbucks, for example.  And in my Tappan Hall my freshman year at Miami.  And, most definitely, when I worked at Cracker Barrel.  And so many other times.  I just love that people who are so different from one another can manage to get along so well when they share a goal.

If this can work on a small scale over and over and over again, I wonder why it's so difficult for it to work on a larger scale?  I would point to the months just following 9/11 as a time when Americans were undoubtedly willing to be unified in their loyalty to the U.S.  But, post-Katrina, there was very little of that.  If we had been so keen on working together, as we should've been, then there wouldn't still be neighborhood after neighborhood of Katrina destruction still waiting to be rescued.  And, again, with Haiti, we heard countless tales of relief efforts for about a month after the earthquake.  I'm certain that Port-Au-Prince is still in a grave state, especially now that they must face down another hurricane season, but I never hear about the needs of Haitians in the news anymore.

I just wish that people could figure out how to look past things that, in many cases, are petty, in order to be unified in the things that really matter.  I don't care that one co-worker is 19, that another one hates Target, and that a third has identified about 28 "favorite bands", of which I'm familiar with about 3...when it comes down to it, we can push that stuff aside and just work.  Working well together isn't cultivated out of total like-mindedness, it's generated by the urgency that a particular thing requires.

Again, as I think about my church, and the church universal, I wonder why the general assertion is that we are all split up into denominations because we can't agree on things, when, really, we ought to be able to put a whole lot of that stuff aside if we are ever going to be able to unify on the central belief that Jesus is who He says He is, and thank God for that!  For a group of people that calls itself "the body", we sure aren't in very good shape.