Light, Dark or Medium?

My wife is a wonderful person and I am truly blessed to be married to her.  Having said that, I am resigned to the fact that I will never fully understand the way she does some things!  Take, for example, the way our dirty laundry is sorted (not that I really want to wash it in public!)  We have 3 laundry bags; one for dark clothing, one for light clothing and one for medium coloured clothing.  So far so good.  It all seems fairly straightforward, doesn't it?

But it really isn't!  To be truthful, the system does work in a fairly straightforward way in many cases.  But there are some cases when logic (or my understanding of it, anyway), is defied.  I regularly get chastised for putting items in the wrong bag, but don't let Sue know that I said so!  For example, if I have a heavy light coloured jumper, I would naturally put it in the bag for light clothing.  However, such a jumper should apperently be put in the dark bag, simply because it is thick (or have I misunderstood the rules?)  Even more complications arise when I have an item of clothing which is multi-coloured!

Yesterday I wore a hooped polo shirt with elements of dark blue, red (medium), with a white collar.  So which bag does it fit into?  I struggled to decide, so in the end I asked for advice, and was told that it should go in the medium bag because of the white collar (I was tempted to ask for a more detailed explanation, but erred on the side of caution).  I guess I will just have to accept that I won't ever fully understand the system.

It's strange how little incidents can set one's mind off on all sorts of tracks.  As I was pondering the mystery of the laundry bags, and how items of clothing are separated, it got me to thinking about how society so often wants to compartmentalise people.  We talk, for example, about the elderly, the homeless, the disabled, the immigrants, the poor etc.; we divide people according to gender, colour, nationality and in all sorts of other ways.  It seems to me that there are two major problems with this approach.

Firstly, if we group together people with common features, we can so easily forget that each person is a unique individual.  We hear a lot of talk in the media these days about "the refugee crisis."  But we need to remember that although there are probably millions of people seeking refuge around the world, those numbers consist of individual people, each of whom are precious in the eyes of God.  Jesus himself demonstrated a willingness to 'stop for the one'.

The second danger in classifying people into groupings is that it can emphasise differences and reinforce barriers between people.   The apostle Paul had to deal with divisions within the early Church, and particularly with the tensions which existed between the Jews and the non-Jews.  This is what he wrote in one of his letters: 'We are no longer Jews or Greeks or slaves or free men or even merely men or women, but we are all the same - we are Christians; we are one in Christ Jesus.' (Galatians 3:28).

All those who follow Jesus can rejoice in the diversity which is so apparent in God's creation, but also celebrate the unity we have in Jesus.  We must also remember that our calling is to continue to work and pray for greater unity in God's world.  And that seems a long way from laundry bags!