Embracing
Your Misfit Nature
“I call myself
the misfit because I can’t make all I done wrong fit with all I gone through in
the punishment.”
Those words are spoken by a character called The Misfit in a short story by Flannery
O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” This guy was a lowdown dirty dog, a
cold-blooded killer, your regulation Ted Kaczinski-Unabomber-Jeffrey Dahmer
type of misfit. Just so you know, this is not the type of misfit I write
about, identify with, or knowingly hang out with.
Misfits like me, and maybe you, are what I like to think of as productive misfits. We
can hold down a job…if we want to. We live within the law…pretty much. And we
generally look enough like other people so that we don’t stand out in a
crowd…all that often.
But we’re slightly off kilter. Productive misfits definitely march to the beat of that
different drummer and stay permanently out of step with the dominant
culture–whether that means the dominant American culture or the dominant church
culture or the dominant female culture. We are woefully out of synch with a
whole lot of people.
And even though O’Connor’s reprehensible character is not like us, the words she
put in his mouth ring true with regard to those of us who feel like misfits:
“We can’t make all we done wrong fit with all we gone through in the
punishment.”
Now, before someone goes and gets all bent out of shape over this, I want to clarify
that when I speak of “all we done wrong” I’m not talking about sin. That’s
another topic altogether. I am not talking about those behaviors and habits
that we know we need to change. I’m talking about our authentic, God-given
nature, our true selves.
SO WHAT IS IT that we misfits have done wrong?
We’ve simply been true to the kind of person God intended us to be.
And what have we gone through in the punishment?
We’ve been teased and mocked and stared at and left out and made to feel foolish and
on and on and on. What all that adds up to is rejection.
Finally, what makes me such an authority on being a misfit?
Well, people have looked at me funny my entire life. As a child, I thought it was
because I belonged to a decidedly eccentric family. We were such a ragtag group
of cartoon characters that even the genuine nut cases in town looked at us
funny.
And then came the summer I turned 10. My parents shipped me off to camp, but within
a few days all of us happy campers had to go home because of a measles
outbreak. I couldn’t call my parents, because of course we didn’t have a phone,
so I got a ride home with a stranger, because of course we didn’t have a car. And then I went bounding through the front door of my house only to
discover it wasn’t my house any more. My family had moved without telling me.
You want to know what a misfit feels like? Imagine standing amid a room full of
strangers in what you think is your living room. And then you look up and see
the woman who drove you home, standing at the door with your stuff, wondering
who on earth you are and how could you not know that your family had moved.
That, believe me, is a defining moment in your life, and the next thing you
know Webster places your photo next to the dictionary definition of misfit.
I WON'T RECOUNT the horrors my misfittedness caused throughout my adolescence and
college years. But I will say this: All those experiences brought me to the end
of myself and the beginning of a life with God when I was just shy of my 22nd
birthday.
After years of feeling as if I didn’t belong, I was thrilled to become a part of the
family of God. At first I was mercifully blind to everything but the love of
God. Pretty soon, though, I became like the blind man in Mark 8. When Jesus
first touched his eyes, the blind man saw everything in a kind of fuzzy haze:
People looked like trees walking around.
That was me in my honeymoon phase with Christ. But then, like the blind man, my
vision cleared completely, and I realized that now, even my new family—my
brothers and sisters in Christ, the kindred spirits I had waited all my life to
meet—well, they were all looking at me funny.
That was 30 years ago, and I spent many of the intervening years trying to fit in
with the dominant church culture. Little by little, I sacrificed pieces of
myself in a completely misguided attempt to be something I could never be, someone
God never intended me to be. But the pressure to conform to some ideal
Christian standard was greater than any pressure the world ever exerted on me
to conform to its ways.
The pressure is all around us. I have this cover from a Christian magazine that
I’ve saved for about six years now. At the time that the magazine crossed my
desk, I was working overtime and then some at another Christian magazine. My
daughters considered me their absentee mother, and I don’t want to think what
my husband considered me to be.
On this cover, a perfect woman—perfect hair, perfect clothes, all that—arrives
home to a perfectly furnished living room just as the perfect grandfather clock
is striking 9:30. She’s carrying a briefcase, a Bible, and a grocery
bag with perfect greens peeking out from the top. Her teenage daughter is
asleep on the sofa with her schoolbooks on her lap. The working Christian
mother is clearly sighing, even though you can’t hear it. She’s distraught—so
much to do, so little time.
Me, I would have danced. It’s only 9:30, and I’m already home! The
house is immaculate! My daughter is asleep! The schoolbooks are decoys—I know
she was really watching television—but who cares? I found perfect greens at
the market! And I’ve got real wood furniture! Even if it’s only for a
photograph!
WE ALL KNOW that images like that are unreal. But what we may not realize is the
subtle cumulative effect those images have on us. As Christians, we talk so
much about the devastating effects of the ideal female image that Hollywood portrays: a slightly anorexic, skimpily clad perfect
woman. Our models, the ones that grace the covers of Christian magazines, may
have more skin on their bones and more clothes on their bodies, but they are no
less perfect.
And then there’s the whole problem of fitting in as women in general, not just
Christian women. There’s a commercial for Office Depot that shows what an
impossible achievement that is. In it, two friends are walking down a busy city
street and notice a woman in white walking toward them.
One friend turns to the other and says, “Who wears white after Labor Day?”
The friend shrugs as if to say, “No one I know!”
Next thing you know, model and fashion expert Kathy Ireland appears before the two
friends and says, “Well, that used to be a fashion faux pas, but now you can
wear white any time!” And then the Office Depot guy comes on, making you wish
you had an expert by your side whenever you needed one and telling you that of course, you can
always find one at Office Depot.
What I take away from this commercial is not what Office Depot intended. I see the
two friends as representing the dominant culture, people who think they know
the rules and are determined to make you conform to them. The woman in white is
the misfit—even though she shouldn’t be.
But the dominant culture stares at her and talks about her—and by the way, the
misfit is well aware of that, even though in this commercial you never see her
viewpoint. Believe me, she knows those two friends are talking about her, because
a woman always knows when other women are talking about her. In true
misfit fashion, the woman in white has no idea what she’s done wrong, and my
guess is that she’s going to spend the rest of her day trying to figure out why
people stare at her and talk about her so often.
The irony, of course, is that the dominant culture has got it all wrong. The
mythical ideal woman—Kathy Ireland, in this case—notifies them that the
rules have changed.
How on earth can we ever hope to fit in with other women if the rules keep
changing? It’s totally disorienting if you’re one of those who don’t even know the
old rules, let alone the new ones. That would be me and women like me.
ANYWAY, BACK to the church. I tried to fit in, I really did. But I’m just all wrapped
up in a different package, as one of my Texas friends once told me. And
“different” was a word that didn’t sit well with the church, it seemed.
But I really didn’t blame the church; I blamed God. I’d start moaning and groaning
and whining to God and asking, “Why did you make me this way?” And then I’d
read a verse like Romans 9:20, which reads, in Paul’s distinctive—ahem—thunderous style, “Who are you to reply against God? Will
the thing formed say to Him who formed it, 'Why have you made me like this?'”
My habit of overthinking—a common trait among misfits—led me to this
conclusion: If God made me like this, and I’m not supposed to challenge Him on
that, then He must not like me very much.
And then, finally, mercifully, God said Enough.
Enough of you trying to be someone I never made you to be.
Enough of you projecting on to Me the rejection you’ve experienced from other
Christians.
Enough of you failing to recognize the love I put in to making you the way you are.
And I finally began to realize that my attempts at changing my true nature amounted
to one great big insult to God.
When the thought first occurred to me that maybe I needed to accept my misfittedness
as my true God-given nature, I began to stop seeing myself in this fuzzy haze.
My vision started to clear, and for the first time in my life I saw my
authentic self—the real me, warts and all, quirks and all, strange ways of
thinking and all—as exactly the person God made me to be.
Scriptures like Galatians 5:1 took on a new and highly personal meaning for me: “It was
for freedom that Christ set you free; why would you take on the yoke of slavery
once again?” Why would I? Why would I ever allow myself to become enslaved to
someone else’s idea of who I should be?
AND I STARTED going before God and asking questions like: Does this mean I should
accept my misfit nature, to the point of embracing it and befriending it?
Yes, that’s what it means. Psalm 139:14: “I will praise you, because I am fearfully
and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, and my soul knows that very
well.”
Does this mean that it doesn’t matter to You, God, that I don’t look and act and
think like the Christians who seem to populate all the Christian magazines and
the TV shows and the megachurches and the major ministries?
Yes, it doesn’t matter. Romans 12:6: “We have different gifts, according to the
grace given us.”
Does this mean I really can be me?
Yes, you can. 1 Corinthians 15:10: “By the grace of God, I am what I am.”
OK, God, I get it. But still, You know how people are going to treat me if I expose
the real me.
Yes, I know. Matthew 5:11: “Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you
and falsely say all kinds of evil against you on account of Me.”
I HAVE COME OUT of the closet as a misfit to give hope to those who have been
made to feel as if they don’t fit in. I have exposed my life in print to
release people from the prison of other people’s expectations. And even though
I’m very much a homebody who would rather go through another 45 hours of labor
than speak in public, I’ve done just that—in person, on the radio, and on
television—because I am determined to allow God to use the experiences I’ve
had to bring hope to other people.
You can live as a productive misfit in society and in the church. You can
see the love God had for you when He made you the way you are. You can
embrace and enjoy who you are, with all your eccentricities and quirkiness and
oddities that make people look at you funny.
To paraphrase John Newton: You are not what you ought to be. You are not what you
want to be. You are not what you hope to be. But still, you are not what you
used to be. And by the grace of God, you are what you are.
That is the perfect description of your reality—as well as your hope.
Click below for additional articles:
The High Cost of Conformity
© 2004 Marcia Ford . Permission is granted to print out for individual personal use only.
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