I often pass myself off as more put-together than I really am, but most nights I sit down after a long social gathering and I beat myself up for all the dumb cheesy things I said, and things I wish I had said differently or didn’t say at all, and how off-balance and weird and twitchy I must look, and how I’m not really making progress on becoming this whole acceptable well-adjusted cool approachable guy that everyone else seems to be already without even trying. I feel like I’ve failed something, or lost at life somehow. I sometimes think everyone else has this secret ingredient to being blended in so smoothly to the inner-circle, like there’s this key or password that no one has told me about, and maybe one day I’ll achieve that code and I can go home in peace without this stomach full of remorseful anxiety over my lack of tact and style, and it’ll be as easy as those wrinkle-free people in fast-talking movies.
But it’s like, no one really keeps score of these things. And everyone actually feels this way about themselves, no matter what they do to compensate or hide it. All of us go home from a night out feeling a hundred pounds heavier and consciously aware of our weirdness. And probably if we were all honest about that, we would be a lot more comfortable inside the tightness of our own skin, because then the script is exposed and the act is dropped and the show is over. If we could all just laugh at ourselves a little bit, then maybe we could really get to know each other for all that messy crusty craziness inside, and actually even like each other, because I’m just as strange as you are, and we could meet there in the stripped down rawness of our guts where we’ve let ourselves out to play. It would probably be more fun that way.
— J
J.S. Park: Hospital Chaplain, Skeptical Christian 
I officially hereby register as “Dude who is not nearly as together as everyone thinks he is.” I say we start a club…
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I can be VP.
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I’ll join the club but I will admit that letting the walls down so everyone can see is a LOT frightening.
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Ironically, it’s more frightening in church. Wait is that irony? Or the other thing? Hmm.
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You are right irony doesn’tt quite fit.
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“Because I’m just as strange as you are.” Actually, you’re more weird than I am. I’m pretty out there, but I read your blog to inspire my strangeness even more so that people will like me more ;-). It looks like fun.
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I am honored to increase your strangeness to all new levels. 🙂
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Just come from my first pilates class and experienced exactly what you’ve described – feeling awkward, fat, unco-ordinated, unattractive and just not part of the “in crowd”.
So how happy am I to come home and read this post whilst eating my lunch and know that we all feel a little bit weird sometimes (to quote a Hanson song and if that’s not weird, I don’t know what is!) 🙂
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I have Hanson’s first album, the actual physical CD. Hah!
And yes, I think even the inner-crowd feels outside the crowd too. Such is the secret we dare never tell.
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It’s comforting to know that there are others who feel,”terminally unique.” We spend way too much time worrying about how others think of us when they are probably doing the same. 🙂
You lamented the other day about a bad sermon but I think what makes you a great pastor is your ability to be transparent and allow others to see you just as you are-vulnerable, very human, and not some facade of unblemished authority. May the Lord continue to bless you and use you as an instrument of his awesome grace.
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Hey my friend, thank you again for your kind comment. Even vulnerability can be a pseudo-facade too, you know? I can only hope to point to where we get the grace 🙂
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