“John’s clothes were woven from coarse camel hair, and he wore a leather belt around his waist. For food he ate locusts and wild honey.”

We speak and read a lot about the desire and need for inclusive thinking and diversity in our workplaces.  There are lots of great reasons for both, and one of the best reasons is the positive business results that are driven from having broad experiences based thinking and different points of view on everything we do.  The business environment is always changing and if we are not willing to accept new and “different than us” thinking and people, then we run the high risk of missing out on what will be new and needed.

Jesus’s model of acceptance of team diversity might be as good as it gets.  Yes, we all have studied and know the differences in the Disciples and their backgrounds, but I’d not recognized an even better example until this past weekend in church when the teaching was on John the Baptist.  It’s right there in front of us that John the Baptist lived in the woods eating locusts and honey.  But, it takes some imagining to see in our mind’s eye that the person who lives in the woods wearing camel woven clothes would not have been someone who everyone else would have looked towards and said, “Hey, there’s someone normal that fits right in with the rest of us.” John was pretty different from the start and he was who Jesus asked to baptize Him.  Jesus shows us from the beginning of His ministry the openness and appreciation to those who are different and run counter to the rest.  He created a special place for those who were diverse and so should we.

Reference: Matthew 3:4 (New Living Translation)