The Bean Theory

I have a theory. It is not a peer-reviewed, academically validated, empirically tested theory. It is the kind of theory that comes to you in the shower or halfway through an airport layover when your brain finally has room to breathe. I have joked about it with my family for years, but I think it’s worth sharing. Bear with me.

I call it the Bean Theory.

Here's the basic idea. When God made you, He gave you a certain number of beans. Now, these beans represent your raw human capacity, your potential, your gifting, your wiring. Think of them as the building materials of who you are. And scattered around your inner life are a bunch of cups: Artistic ability. Emotional intelligence. Athletic prowess. Street smarts. Cognitive horsepower. Spatial reasoning. Musical ear. Social charisma. Mechanical intuition. The cups are almost endless.

Here's the thing, though: God filled those cups Himself, and He did not use a formula.

Some people have a whole lot of beans in one cup. We call those people prodigies, specialists, savants. They can barely boil water or navigate a parking garage, but they will play Chopin in a way that makes you forget your own name. Their cups are wildly uneven and they are magnificent for it.

Some people have their beans spread pretty evenly across all the cups. We call those people generalists, and the world desperately needs them even if they spend a suspicious amount of time wondering why they aren't great at any particular thing. (Spoiler: you are great at being adaptable. That is not nothing.)

Some people have a lot of beans, full stop. Their cups runneth over. We call those people gifted, and if they are lucky, someone helps them figure out what to do with all of that. If they are not lucky, they spend decades wondering why everything feels so hard to organize.

Some people have beans in unexpected cups. An engineer with a poet's soul, a linebacker who can sight-read music, a kid who can't pass a spelling test but can fix any engine you put in front of him. We call those people twice exceptional, or just confusing, depending on the day.

And then there are the people who have a solid, respectable, perfectly dignified distribution of beans across a reasonable number of cups. The world calls them average, which is one of the rudest things we do, because "average" is just another word for "human," and human beings are not average. They are fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14), and the fact that their cups aren't overflowing does not mean God was being stingy. It means He made them for something that does not require overflowing.

Here is where it gets interesting.

We spend so much of our lives looking at somebody else's cups. We are enthralled by the person who has more beans in the cups we care about, and quietly smug about the person who has fewer. We build entire cultural systems around which cups matter most, and they are rarely the cups that most people actually have the most beans in. It is an exhausting and demoralizing game, and I would argue that God never designed it to be played at all.

Because the Bean Theory, if it teaches us anything, is that the distribution was intentional.

When Jesus is asked in Luke 10:27 to summarize the whole of the law, He says: " Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. That word strength (ischus in the Greek) doesn't just mean physical muscle. It means the full extent of your God-given ability. Your capacity. Your particular configuration of resources, means, and empowered action. In other words: your beans.

Loving God with all your strength means loving Him with the actual beans you have, not the beans you wish you had, not the beans you are quietly jealous that someone else got. The beans in your cups. All of them. Directed at Him.

Which means the Artist glorifies God by making art. The Empath glorifies God by feeling deeply and caring well. The Analyst glorifies God by thinking hard and getting things right. The Mechanic glorifies God with his hands. The Generalist glorifies God by being the person who can hold everything together when the specialists can't talk to each other.

None of this is about comparison. It never was. It was always about stewardship.

You did not pick your beans. You did not fill your own cups. But here is something worth sitting with: beans are actually seeds. And seeds were never meant to just sit in a cup. They were meant to be planted, watered, tended, and grown into something. Jesus told a story about this once in Matthew 25:14-30, about a master who gave his servants different amounts of money before leaving on a long trip. Some invested what they were given and came back with more. One buried his in the ground and came back with exactly what he started with. The master was not impressed. Because the point was never the coins. The point was what you did with them. Your beans work the same way. You are absolutely responsible for what you do with what's in your cups. And the invitation is not to resent the person whose cups look different from yours, or to spend your one life wishing God had distributed things differently. The invitation is to pick up your cups, look at what's inside, and ask the only question that actually matters:

Lord, how do you want me to use these?

I think He'll have some ideas.