“But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that?” [Matthew 5:44-48a, NAB]
For years, what I wanted more than anything else was to be normal. I wanted to fit in. As a family of immigrants, our family was odd. We didn’t have a car, my mother was the breadwinner, my father looked like my grandfather (28 years older than my mother), and we lived in the inner city with boarders upstairs. As a child and teen, none of these realities helped me fit in. I began a systematic cover up.
By adulthood, I had created a coat of many colors. And I appeared to have buried most of those old concerns as a good adult should, but they lurked close to the surface all the same. Don’t be weird. Don’t rock the boat. Pick up the correct fork. Watch carefully, mimic as needed. And then I surprised myself in my late twenties and made an uncharacteristic leap into Christ. I dumped myself into another world, a Christian world, with its own set of rules and expectations. I spent years figuring out what this identity needed to look like and sound like. I became more adept than ever: a chameleon. Not that I was a fake. I loved Christ and my initial conversion was true: “Dear Jesus, I believe you are who you say your are and I want to follow you.” But I got caught up in a lot of different flavors (denominations) along the way.
Forty years later, I have finally begun to shed my acrobatic machinations with a greater desire to simply expose my authentic self. Lo and behold, who is evolving there? Someone unusual. That’s funny and ironic. But isn’t that the point? Because it is the unusual person who can “love an enemy,” or “pray for the mean girls,” or “love the unlovable,” or, in general, work outside one’s comfort zone. It is the unusual person who can live inside a paradox, a both/and world. It is an unusual person that can accept who a person actually is instead of who I have wanted that person to be.
Meditations from Zion 