One day I was walking along a lonely beach and spotted a rather unusual piece of driftwood lying on the sand. It had a secondary piece which was curled around the main stem in such a way that kept you thinking about how it could have formed that way.
I decided to take it home knowing that it would be quite a conversation piece sitting on a shelf.
Further along the beach I noticed another piece, half buried in the sand. At first glance it also looked as though it may be worth collecting as it was obviously very smoothly washed after a long period of drifting in the ocean. However, when I pulled it out of the sand there was really nothing interesting about it at all so I threw it away.
After walking on a few steps I had a convicting thought that there was something sad about the fact that no one would be likely to take that piece of driftwood home simply because there was nothing interesting about it.
Isn’t it the same with people? If our immediate superficial examination of a person doesn’t suggest to us that a conversation with him or her would be reasonably entertaining or educational then we may be reluctant to look deeper for less obvious qualities.
The reality is that there are a lot of people whom nobody is likely to take home because there doesn’t appear to be anything interesting about them.