The Cocoa Puffs Incident

Early in our marriage, I bought a box of Cocoa Puffs. I was rationing them, leaving them in the pantry and waiting for the perfect morning to enjoy them. But when I finally went to grab my cereal, the box was empty. Sharilyn had eaten them.

We’ve been married a long time now, and we still talk about this. She reminds me that I had waited four weeks to eat them, but that fact has yet to convince me! We call it “The Cocoa Puffs Incident.” I’m not proud of it, but in the moment, I made it a massive deal. We were two people who loved each other, who had chosen each other, and who were building a whole life together. And there I was, turning breakfast cereal into a battleground.

That’s what happens when you take two different people and ask them to become one. The small stuff can feel enormous.

And if we’re not careful, we can do the exact same thing as a church. We can take something the size of a cereal box and treat it like a hill to die on.

The Gap and the Tube Man

Put enough passionate believers in one room, and you’re going to get disagreement. That doesn’t mean something is broken. It may just mean people actually care. But it does raise a question every growing church eventually has to answer: What do we do in the gap between what we want and what the body decides?

Imagine that at the end of service, the elders — men we’ve asked to lead us — stand up and announce three new decisions for our meeting space. They’re buying a new projector. They’re buying a portable air conditioning unit. And they’re putting one of those wacky, inflatable tube men out by the road so people know we’re here.

I’m fully on board with the projector and the AC. But the tube man? That’s not the call I would’ve made. So what do I do with that?

Maintain. Not Manufacture.

Paul answers that exact question — not about the tube man, but about unity — in Ephesians 4. The very first thing he does is take the pressure off. He tells a wildly diverse church to be “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3).

Maintain. Not manufacture. We don’t cook unity up out of thin air. We don’t manufacture it with enough good vibes and church potlucks. The Spirit of the living God has already built it. Our job isn’t to construct unity. Our job is to not wreck it.

If you walk down the grocery store aisle, you might see a bag of Cheetos sitting in the “All-Natural” section. They took a glowing, nuclear-orange snack and slapped an “all-natural” label on it, hoping you’d believe it grew out of the ground that way. That’s counterfeit. We don’t do that in the church. We don’t take a divided, angry room and slap a “united” label on it. That’s not unity. That’s branding. Paul isn’t calling us to pretend we’re united. He’s calling us to maintain the real unity the Spirit has already given us.

And how do we do that? “With all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love” (Ephesians 4:2). Every one of those qualities is visible. The family can see whether we’re holding our opinions lightly or gripping them with both hands.

The Triage Question

There are absolutely hills worth dying on in the Christian faith. Paul lists them in the very next breath:

Those are the load-bearing walls. The foundation. Those are things worth fighting for. And if we can’t agree on those, we don’t have much business trying to worship as one body. But notice how short the list is.

Most of what churches actually argue about is nowhere near that list.

A lot of the friction starts because we skip the triage step. We take a pet issue, slap a “die for this” label on it, and go to war. And the second we do that, a preference becomes a principle. A minor disagreement starts to feel like a betrayal.

So before we dig our heels in, we need to ask this out loud: What weight does this disagreement actually deserve? When I don’t get my way on the tube man decision, I have a choice. I can let the small thing be small, or I can quietly go find a sub-group of people who agree with me.

Finding a faction feels like community at first. Someone finally validates your frustration. Someone says, “You’re not crazy. I thought that was a bad idea too.” But it doesn’t heal anything. It just rehearses the hurt. And it’s dangerously close to what Paul warns about in Titus 3:10.

Yielding Isn’t Losing

So why is it so hard to let things go? Because yielding feels like losing. It feels like getting rolled over. It feels like saying my opinion didn’t matter. And as long as yielding feels like losing, we’ll fight it every single time.

But Paul gives us a completely different picture. He tells us to have the mind of Christ, who “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself” (Phil. 2:6-7).

The mind of Christ is the mind that doesn’t grasp. And that flips the whole thing. Yielding isn’t losing. It isn’t being spineless. It isn’t “going along to get along.” It’s a fierce, deliberate decision to hold your brothers and sisters higher than your own ideas. It’s the way of the cross showing up in a Tuesday night decision you didn’t get your way on.

The Watching World

Why does any of this matter? Because on the night before He died, Jesus prayed for us by name. He prayed “that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them” (John 17:23).

Our unity is a witness. And when we split over absolutely nothing, the world sees that too. We don’t stay together because our leaders are always right. They’ll miss calls. So would you. So would I. We stay because we are one body, with a humble King as our head. We’re not a committee that built a religious organization. We’re a body that was given to each other.

So pick your hills carefully. Grip the “seven ones” tightly, and open your hands on the rest. There are only a few hills worth dying on. And the Cocoa Puffs or the tube men are never one of them!

This post was adapted from a lesson originally shared at the Desert Way congregation. Check it out here.