I sucked at sports and PE was the bane of my existence. My PE teacher referred to me a few times as butterball in front of all my peers, which only encouraged an already popular form of sport amongst my classmates that consisted in making my life a wretched mess. When I started in Issaquah, I just wanted to play with the other kids. By the time I was starting 5th grade, a good day meant just being left alone.
Girls didn't seem to like me, either. At church and at school, I would try to make friends with my twin sister's friends, but to no avail. I was a second-class citizen to them, for the most part. It was hard for me to get along with people since my cultural conditioning in church was making me socially incompatible with my classmates, but my inquisitive and introspective nature didn't make me many friends at church, either. I had one ally among my peers at school, and he was dealing with the same crap I was.
When fifth grade rolled around, they offered a beginning orchestra program that fed into the orchestra program at the middle school level. There were limited seats in the program, so all the students who were interested in joining would submit their names for a lottery which would determine membership in the program, and I wanted it. I didn't know why, but I wanted it bad.
The list was posted at the end of the week, and I went to check if my name was on the list. I was second place on the waiting list, while Katie had gotten into the viola section straight away. I was devastated. I immediately started crying and cried the entire bus ride home. I had no idea why.
A few days time would create a shuffle in the list which would ensure my entry into the program. My orchestra teacher, Mr. Townsend, was the only teacher I'd ever had who made a major investment of time into my life outside of what he had to do, and it remained that way until college. Since then, I have found a significant portion of my identity in music.
It turned out that music was my "in" at church, too. I started playing guitar for Kid's Church and found a niche there where people (smaller than me) respected me. I tried to get involved in youth leadership, but I had too soft a heart for the social ladder and I got beat back many times. Again, I found myself an easy target, and I decided to shift out of the limelight instead of keep taking shots.
I could continue relating this progression to you, the reader, in detail, but I am laying this foundation for you for you to see a theme in my life which I have been dwelling upon recently. I have been using music as a means to carve a place in society for myself because I have perceived that who I am without music is not generally palatable to the majority of my peers. When I speak up about an injustice I see in a youth ministry or an inequality I see in the way a person looks at the world, or when I speak about the color of my soul and ask a girl about the color of hers, I find very few people who are willing to suffer me through the process of sorting these things out...much less take my comments as what they're meant to be––a gift of feedback meant with love.
And I understand fully that this makes me an outcast statistically. I am an INTP according to Myers-Briggs, and there ain't a ton of us out there (3-5%, to be precise). I am an analyzer and an interpreter and a reviewer. It is my gift and my curse. I use my gifts of analysis and interpretation and review to make music, but music is not my passion. I don't love it for its own sake. I love it for the acceptance and approval that has been almost my only oasis in this sea of people whom I don't understand and I don't function well with, but whom I am drawn to love and receive love from.
Unemployment has given me a lot of time to think about a lot of things that I haven't thought about before. Of course, these aren't the best conditions under which to evaluate the scope of my life, I'm sure, since loss of job, having to move, a birth/death in the family, and loneliness in your early twenties are all some pretty big freaking stressors. But I have come to one firm conclusion in all this mess: God loves me.
I know this because there is no reason for me to still care for the people who have, for the most part, so utterly discarded me. But I do. I don't know why.
It would be a lot easier for me to travel the way of Nietzsche and nihilism as I teeter endlessly toward insanity and alienation, but a still small voice bids me swim upstream.
I could call myself a super-man and look down upon the people around me who make me feel so small just to feed this starving ego, but the ailing voice of a Jewish peasant dying under the heel of the people for whom he cared so deeply echoes in my brain with the words "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and I know he was talking about them AND me.
Or I could whither under all the self-accusation and doubt that accompanies these times and sail into this open sea of human depression, but the living voice of a dead God calls to me from the shore and bids me "feed my sheep".
So this writing, dear friends, is a public confession of God's word in my life. I may not be the loudest or the coolest or the prettiest shepherd that God ever imagined, but He has called me to devote my life to the care of his sheep and I said 'yes'. It was a long time ago and I was young and I didn't know what I was doing, but I said 'yes'. And today I say 'yes' again. I don't know how or where or when or with whom, but I am publicly devoting myself to this task with the witness of all you, my readers. (Any of you who have gotten this far must truly be good friends or truly bored.)
If you get a chance over the next few days, would you pray for me? Ask God to continue to help me figure this stuff out? Pray his provision in the midst of this difficult time? And ask that he give me the strength and endurance I will need to finish this story well? I will need as much of your prayer as I can get, I'm sure.
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