Chopped Unity
Have you ever seen the tv show, Chopped? The basis of the show is each contestant is given a collection of ingredients in order to make a specific type of dish within a given time frame. My family loves this show, so every Christmas we each bring a collection of ingredients to blindly swap with each other in order to create a dish. The ingredients are meant to be random and difficult to combine in order to make a tasty dish. We have brave judges who judge each dish at the end of the 30 minute allotted cooking time and each year the winner is sent a custom trophy from the previous years' winner.
I have ZERO experience and even less skill in the kitchen. I never learned to cook and I have never been around people who love to cook. Somehow my siblings talked me into entering the Family Chopped Challenge one year (this was likely just to punish my mom because she was a judge). I do not even remember the ingredients I was given but I was absolutely stumped on what to do with these ingredients. I ended up throwing them all into a blender and calling it a "smoothie". I believe three of the four judges nearly vomited and the only reason the fourth judge did not is because he refused to even taste it!
That year, my youngest son began to watch the show Chopped. He loved it! He also began cooking with his mom on a regular basis, so when the next Christmas, I added my 4 year old son to my team in the Family Chopped Challenge (this took a petition to the contestants {my siblings} and the judges {my mom, nieces and in-laws} that was approved after much debate).
Once our time began, my 4 year old son and I quickly opened the bag of ingredients to find a 2 liter of Coke, cheese, ham, spinach and an apple. Immediately my son told me to turn the stove on get the skillet out. He began barking orders like he was chef! I don't remember exactly how we did it but we finished making a dip with a Coke float with plenty of time to spare. My son was confident that we had just won the competition, because he just has that much confidence, but I was not sure we had done any better than my horrific smoothie the year before.
The first judge tasted the dip and then drank the Coke float, and to my surprise, and to my sons' expectations, her eyes got big, her eye brows raised and with a complete look of shock she said, "wow, this is really good". My siblings were not buying this at all! The next judge took a bite of our dip, drank a sip of our Coke float and had the same response! At this point, the entire room is in an uproar. There was no way that my son and I had created anything close to edible, much less tasty! All four judges were impressed and to the embarrassment of my siblings we won the Family Chopped Challenge!
Ingredients matter. If we do not know what to do with what we have then we will not be able to make what we need. There may be times where throwing everything together in a blender may produce a decent smoothie, but more often than not we need to know how to handle the ingredients we have been given. We need to be intentional about turning on the stove and getting the skillet out to make something good.
When it comes to authentic unity, the ingredients matter. We need to gather the correct ingredients and develop an intentional plan to make something good. Those ingredients are not Coke, cheese or spinach (even though that dip we made may bring unity to any gathering!). The ingredients needed are prayer, humility, understanding, sacrifice and perseverance.
Like the tv show, Chopped, we also must be able to use whatever ingredients that are available to us. There may not be the common ingredient of similar preferences, tastes or activities but that is not a reason to bow out of the contest. God will use what we do have to build something that we could not. He will use things that do not seemingly connect with each other in order to create clear, deep and strong bonds.
We have the ability to use the ingredients of prayer, humility, understanding, sacrifice and perseverance to create something great, even if there are seemingly no other ingredients that fit. Authentic unity begins with what you do have and what you can do, not with what you don't have and what you can't do.