In a training session today, my colleagues and I were encouraged to brainstorm what we would need to live and not just exist. Our trainer turned over a page on a big flip chart with her pen poised to receive ideas. Within a second - not an exaggeration - a chorus of voices chanted, "Money." It was immediate. Apparently a no-brainer. Little conversations started around me about how important money was, chuckles and eye rolling indicating that everyone needed more money. "So, enough money, then?" our trainer said, writing 'Enough money' down on the flip chart. People laughed. "I never have enough money," was the general bantery consensus, the oh-so-obvious agreement between the group. I was speechless. I had wanted to say 'Purpose' and felt wrong-footed, incredulous.
Within the next few seconds a flurry of responses compounded my feeling. Sleep seemed to be a major contender in the living-not-existing hierarchy of needs. Food was another one. I was relieved when the masses agreed on love, family, friends and social life. Surely relationships are vital in living and not merely existing. But then clothes and make up went on the list. Cigarettes and alcohol followed shortly. When I eventually offered 'purpose' to the trainer, she enthusiastically wrote 'Purpose and occupation' on the board to the tune of a silent and distracted majority. Not necessary to live and not just exist, so it seemed to my contemporaries.
I thought, maybe people are missing something here. Maybe they've misunderstood the question, and instead they're thinking, 'What do we need to exist and survive?' Though then I'd be hard pressed to understand why clothes and make up are necessary. No. I think they were responding to the same question I was.
I have to be honest. It's been a while since I felt how I did this afternoon. The sense of isolation and incredulity that I used to feel when I was in high school, trying to relate to my classmates who would brush away my musings and repeat, "Melanie, you're so deep," or "You think so/too much." I felt wholly different and separate, I couldn't relate to these people who were meant to be my peers. I was taken aback. I felt like they were a different species, to be honest.
Thus the lightbulb moment, the humbling and sobering realisation. I am not one of them. No matter how hard I try to fit in or understand, how hard I kid myself into believing that I find Christians and churches too churchy and insular, that I'm more at ease with 'the real world' and 'normal people', that I can have a laugh and a joke and fit into their ways of thinking. I am not like them. No matter how hard I try to fit in, I will never be able to honestly accept in the depths of my being that the meaning of life is nothing more than money, clothes, make up, and alcohol. I will never be 'of the world', for as long as I am 'in' it. I will always be sitting there in brainstorming sessions like today's, thinking incredulously, "Purpose, anyone? Legacy? Contributing to society and making a difference to someone other than yourself, for something greater and higher than yourself? No? Okay. Never mind then."
I realised that I had forgotten this a bit. Taken it for granted. Thought that I was part of this society, this world made up of people who think this way. But I am not. We who have met God an chosen to follow Jesus' footsteps will always be different, marked out, called to and driven by something else. At the end of the day, there's no getting around it.
I have a confession to make. I felt judgmental initially. But in the end, what I feel most is sadness. It makes me sad that some people honestly think that clothes and make up are what makes life worth living. It depresses me that when it comes to the crunch, they think that is what makes them get up in the morning. Those things wouldn't get me through half a day. I feel despair at the ways that lots of people in my generation think, where self-fulfilment is the only lasting motivation. The inevitable consequences of commercialism and a lack of a sense of belonging to something greater than yourself. I couldn't do it. I couldn't live my whole life purely for money, clothes, make up and booze. Could you?
So, all this to say, today I was hit with this realisation: You are different. You're meant to be. Don't kid yourself. You're a Christian. Own it.
