Misfit

I am a misfit. I have always been a misfit. I never understood why, and often blamed circumstance. If only_______ , I would be like everyone else, I would fit in. We moved often when I was growing up.  I was always the outsider. The kid from private school in public school, the kid from the South living in the Northeast, the kid from the burbs living in the country, the kid from the country living in the city. The pattern continued into my adult life. The sheltered kid away from home, the married twenty something, the stay-at-home dad, the awkward social networker, the wannabe redneck. With each new circumstance the same feeling, "I don't fit".

I hated being a misfit. I would have given most anything to conform and it wasn't from my lack of trying I failed. Was I cursed? Quite the opposite, I am blessed to be a misfit; once frustrated, now grateful. It was not circumstance which kept me from fitting, it was God. He loved me so much he never let go. Had I ever managed to fit into the world I may have been lost forever. We can not fit into the world and have a relationship with God, we must choose.

You and I were born misfits and marred by sin into a broken world. There is a vulnerable state between life and death, where we are unable to be one with God but desire to live. Our enemy offers many attractive diversions; promises of fullness, satisfaction, and pleasure. They mask the emptiness for a time, but there is a nagging uneasiness which is hard to ignore, something is missing. Jesus is God's answer to the uneasiness. Through Jesus' death and resurrection God created a way for us to fit with Him. Jesus paid the cost of our brokenness and restored us so we can be one with God. We don't fit this world because we are designed to fit God.

I am a misfit, I do not fit into this world even though sometimes I am tempted. The ways of the world are attractive and full of promise, but I will not allow myself to be fooled. I celebrate my misfittedness and place my trust in God. He will faithfully continue to bring other misfits into my life and we will discover we fit extraordinarily well together. I am blessed to have a misfit wife, misfit children, misfit friends, a misfit pastor, and a misfit ministry. Praise God for misfits.

Be proud to be a misfit. Find a relationship with God through the biggest misfit of all, Jesus Christ, your savior and God's answer. Connections will be a lover of misfits because God is a lover of misfits, come find where you fit in.

 ² And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. (Romans 12:2, New King James Version)

  
¹⁵ Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. ¹⁶ For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world. ¹⁷ And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever. (1 John 2:15-17, New King James Version)

 ¹⁷ These things I command you, that you love one another.  
¹⁸ “If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. ¹⁹ If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. (John 15:17-19, New King James Version)

 ¹⁶ For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. ¹⁷ For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.  
¹⁸ “He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. ¹⁹ And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. (John 3:16-19, New King James Version)