……….

Frederick Buechner once said, “The world sets into making us what the world would like us to be, and because we have to survive after all, we try to make ourselves into something that we hope the world will like better than who we originally were. That is the story of all our lives and in the process of living out that story; the original shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us hardly end up living out of it at all.   Instead, we live out all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.”

I am shocked at how true this is.  I am also shocked at how easily the lies creep into our lives.

It seems that we fall for the same lies over and over again.

I think what’s most interesting is that the lies often push us not towards destruction (although we sometimes end up there) but towards mediocrity.  The lies we believe about ourselves are almost never so bad that we end up in jail or dead.  Instead they just tell us to settle.

This, I think is why for most of us our lives are defined as “average.”

I don’t mean average in the sense of ability or skills.  I mean average in terms of our life lived.  We all fight so hard to simply fit into the crowd, to remain average.

Well I reject this.  I want to stand out if standing out is where God wants me.  I want to be exceptional if the exceptional is where God is.  I don’t want to look back on my life and wonder, “why was I too afraid to act?”  I don’t want to believe the average lie.