Bananas!

  Hello everyone! I'm Lily and I'm so happy that I joined this awesome group! I've enjoyed reading your entries and was excited to write my own. So excited in fact I couldn't choose a topic until yesterday, which was a big mistake. Anyways, I decided to multitask by warming up for an English assignment with this. We’re going through a unit where we try to take boring topics and make them interesting. So I chose bananas which weren't very uninteresting to start with but, oh well. Here it is! 

Bananas.

They're a strange yellow fruit with a horrible tasting peel, (don’t ask why I know,) yet they contain a delightfully sweet and soft fruit enclosed within. Bananas are sort of like anything in a Fed-Ex shipping box, they get banged up and often bruised, which in my opinion is really a tragedy. 

These little yellow guys are bred to have no seeds, so they are propagated over and over again, which means that every banana plant of the same type has the exact same genetics as its neighbor. Although this method has perks like really good bananas over and over and over again, this can also cause problems like the tragic loss of the Gros Michel. This variety of banana is fondly remembered as the Big Mike variety went extinct after a soil borne fungal disease known as Panama Disease wiped out the entire species. The malady wouldn't have been as much of a problem if the bananas had some genetic variety. Maybe they could have built up immunity, and Big Mike would still be around. Yet the modern variety, the Cavendish banana, is still bred this way.

Diversity is an important part of God's design for us. When we invite Jesus into our hearts, we become a part of something bigger, something surpassing the individual and creating the church, the body of Christ.

1st corinthians chapter 12 states:

13 For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body.

Our different gifts make us stronger together, because if we were all the same, what good would that be? I can't imagine the chaos that would ensue if we all had the same gifts.

17 If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? 18 But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.

It's really comforting to know that we are just the way God wanted us to be. And although it sometimes can seem like the gift God gave is not very exciting, useful or aPEELing, God gave each one of us that specific gift for a reason. Paul addresses this a few verses later.

-Lily Dummer