Wouldn't want to cause diversity, now would we?

Was chatting with a friend today & they were mentioning some conflict they were having with others & how they were kind of being silent about the whole thing & hoping it would go away. My friend explained the rationale behind this as being that they "didn't want to cause diversity"....

...what my friend meant to say was that they didn't want to cause 'division' over differing strongly held opinions, but what came out of her mouth was so much more interesting & so telling....

... the richness of humanity & the richness of the church is our diversity, all of us are unique, none of us will every be duplicated, not now, not ever... the random collection of cells & tissues, thoughts & ideas, emotions & personality, soul & spirit that make up each of us are put together in such a way that, while each of us shares a lot of similarities with the rest of the human race, each of us is so extremely different, that we can well use the phrase "the universe next door" to describe those around us. Each one of us is this vast, unreachable expanse of mystery.....

...and this is our richness. Because of our differences, we can learn from each other. We don't have to fit everything into our one finite lifespan, we can learn so much from listening to others, from hearing of their experiences & using that as a bridge or stepping stool to reach to even greater heights (or decide to repeat the same lessons as others, just 'cause we want to).... in our uniqueness we get to be who we are instead of trying to be everyone else....

... but this is so stifled in society & especially the church. We are told to conform, to think the same, act the same. We worry a lot about being 'right' & compare our degree of 'rightness' with those around us, always trying to show that we are more 'right' than another... and all the while we become more & more alone & often lose more & more of who we are in our uniqueness, all for the sake of avoiding 'division' --- which again, is perhaps just avoiding 'diversity'....

... we need to embrace our diversity, we need to listen to each other, even when (& sometimes especially when) it's not what we want to hear or it's something different than what we're used to...