Square Pegs

Christian (who doesn’t seem to fit in),

With all of your quirks and oddities, remember that you’re made in the image of God. You may not connect with everyone and may not be understood by everybody. That’s ok—God doesn’t intend for you to carry a burden that heavy anyway. Connecting with everyone you know and trying to relate to everyone you come in contact with is a weight nobody should bear (though many unnecessarily take it upon themselves).

Don’t worry about trying to fit in. You’re accepted in Christ. Don’t feel like you have to change the world by yourself. Even Paul’s last letter reveals your life with be filled with people who don’t believe what you’re willing to die for. If it’s sin, then, of course, fight it, mortify it, kill it, confess it, and trust Christ to forgive it. But if it’s simply you being you (again I’m not speaking of blatant sin now), then be who God made you to be for his glory.

Don’t feel the pressure to go with the flow, change your personality, or strive to be something else so you can get into the ‘inner circle.’ C.S. Lewis has already spoken about that folly: “The circle cannot have from within the charm it had from outside. By the very act of admitting you, it has lost its magic.”

Just as the sinless creation manifests itself in lots of diverse ways, so to the redeemed body of Christ has lots of different members. And if you haven’t noticed, people being conformed to the image of Jesus Christ and daily changed from one degree of glory to another still tend to show a lot of variableness in that growth process.

I’ve been in several end-of-life situations. There’s only going to be a few people around your deathbed at hospice. If you die in ICU, the number will be even fewer. At worst, you’ll die in a sudden accident and be alone. At best, you’ll die at home with maybe a dozen people there. And if you were counting on going out of here with the glamor of a building filled to capacity at your “celebration of life,” we now live in a time when your family might be forced to have a private graveside with no visitors.

If that’s true Since that’s true, why spend the life God gave you trying to please such a large crowd of people that will only dwindle as the decades of your life go by? God made you you so you could spend your life being conformed to look like Him—not anyone else. Though it may sound paradoxical or contradictory, spend your life being yourself and not anyone else while trusting the Spirit to make you less like yourself until the day you finally look like Him—because that’s the genuine acceptance that the death of Christ purchased for you in the first place.