No right to be frustrated

Take a look at the following list of 25 movies. It's well ordered, I promise.

• Sabrina
• Schindler's List
• Indian in the Cupboard
• Apollo 13
• Twelve Monkeys
• Tommy
• Toy Story
• Balto
• Bottle Rocket
• Before Sunrise
• Goldfinger
• Usual Suspects
• Quick and the Dead
• Hell Night
• Help!
• Heat
• Mallrats
• Manchurian Candidate
• My Man Godfrey
• Waterworld
• Dazed and Confused
• Pulp Fiction
• Pump Up the Volume
• Risky Business
• Richie Rich

Can you discern the order? 

Is it frustrating? 

There's obviously a pattern but what is it?

What if I said it's in alphabetical order?

That seems immediately wrong, doesn't it? The letter S doesn't come before I and nothing comes before A. 

But why is that? Why has a lot of our life been categorized due only to a totally arbitrary placement of letters? What if instead of the normal song-order it went:

l, s, x, i, a, c, t, f, b, g, k, u, n, q, h, z, m, w, d, p, o, y, j, r, v, e?

Seems like a lot of nonsense but it comes from this question that popped up in my head last night as I couldn't sleep:

How often is hate tied to something that is an arbitrary preference which has no morality?

The order of the alphabet has zero morality - there is no 'right' or 'wrong', just what's generally accepted. This may be so and I may even know this fact but, I'd guess that finding books in a library arranged by my order above would absolutely infuriate me, likely to the point of thinking myself right and the librarian wrong.

I've been slowly making my way through Nate Collins' book All but Invisible. One of the aims for the book is to "outline a vision for Christian community in which straight and nonstraight people might be reconciled so they can flourish together in full awareness of their shared humanity." (I lifted that straight from the back of the book).

Under a section of chapter 2 called "Interdependent Flourishing"; Nate points to 1 Corinthians 12 - the section where Paul talks about the church as if they were parts of the body and how they all belong for the body to be a functioning body - whether the ear wants the foot there or not. A footnote quote here is from David Garland:

What may polarize the world does not or should not divide the church. The segmentation of the Corinthian congregation into cliques is the by-product of human depravity and spurs individuals to treat their differing spiritual experiences as a pretext for reinstating class division - now employing spiritual classifications - so as to elevate themselves over others. 

There are so many fractures created in community in debates and judgements that have no morally correct choice yet we act as if there is some superiority to be had! I see this all the time in my life in how I judge people that struggle in different ways than I do. My choices are constantly no different than theirs are, morally, yet I can stick my nose in the air and say
"Oh, no, I don't struggle with that any more."
or think
"My struggles are different. I'm doing better than them."

These attitudes, whether spoken to anyone or just kept inside our minds have the power to decimate the church. When I think those ways I don't love the same and I don't see Christ in my brother and sister - I cripple the ability to have communion with them and the whole body (myself included) is crippled because of it.

Oftentimes it's even more subtle - how during a group discussion I may think of how differently I'd answer or how much more I understand this part of the bible or some other nonsense. The experiences, perspectives, and thoughts of our brothers and sisters are not just valuable but according to Paul, they are necessary! Just like the body needs hands and eyes, the church needs different types of people.

Now to look back at my silly alphabet thought experiment - something so arbitrary can also be so deeply held and ingrained that we can't figure out any other perspective. We have to fight to diminish that frustration of the foreign and see the other and new perspective as useful and as a tool of growth.

Gosh I need to embrace that...