When I moved to the Midwest, to what felt like the lock on the chain of slave states, I was convinced that I had NOTHING in common with these people—black or white or in between. Everything felt and sounded foreign to me.

Until I got to know the routine.

Then I realized that everything that the word of God said was true: nothing is new under the sun and that we all really kinda all the same, as much as we like to point out how different we are and try to be different. Slightly different accents and ways to season food based on availability of product and hairstyles and clothing choices based on weather don’t change the fundamentals. We are and will always be humans who laugh and cry and bleed and love and eat and sleep and grief and want and need and wish and hope and dream and wonder and think and live and (one day) die-hopefully in Christ.

In the body of Christ, we schism and schism and schism and schism. But if we are Christ’s and He is ours, the FUNDAMENTALS DO NOT CHANGE. He died for us, became our sin so that we could be come His righteousness and regain our access to God’s presence. We have regained access to the things lost in the garden. Our choices on how to access those things and when, what we look like or sound like doing it, what positions we get to have while accessing it? Those things are majoring in the minors. To point fingers at denominations and scoff because they don’t serve God the same way we do misses the mark of the high calling in Christ, which is LOVE. We love people into fullness. We love them into excellency of the knowledge of Jesus Christ. We love them into correction. We love them into deeper revelation. We don’t love them into our style of worship method or way or preaching or programming or shouting or dancing or tongue talking. That’s your preference, not God ordained.

Christ IS all and IN all, and that IS all that matters. We must learn to govern ourselves in the peace and maturity of that fact. We are all members of one body of one Christ who prayed before He sacrificed Himself that we come to unity WITH EACH OTHER in the way that He had unity WITH THE FATHER. He in us and we in Him and Us together and all in The Father Through Christ.