Blessed Are the Misfits: Great News for Believers who are Introverts, Spiritual Strugglers, or Just Feel Like They're Missing Something

One of the hardest-to-swallow, most countercultural, counter intuitive implications of the gospel is that bearing up under a difficult burden with patient perseverance is a good thing.

It makes you wonder about God: What kind of father wants to be pestered? Probably one who really loves his children and is hoping they don’t wait until the perfect moment, or until they are perfect themselves, before they finally talk to him.

The good news: It seems like you really want more of God. And, from what I read, that’s a really good thing. You’re going to get what you’re looking for. If you want more of God, you’re going to yearn. And yearning isn’t bad. Yearning happens when you love.

It seems like being “passionate for something big” is something positive, but I keep running into Jesus telling us to be like children. And children are small. Maybe you’ve noticed that too. They do little things, and they’re okay with it. Jesus seems passionate about other little things too. Mustard seeds. Sparrows. Lilies of the field. Single days, like today, instead of The Big Future. Little acts of our will.

It is too easy, then, as someone who’s felt rejected, let down, even made fun of by church people, to simply refuse to love them. It’s too easy to live my life in reaction to them. Yes, I can easily craft a false narrative about how awful others are and how much better than them I am, but it excuses me from the hard work of forgiveness and patience.

Jesus is exactly what I would hope God would be: a blunt-speaking, underdog-loving, field-leveling, jaw-droppingly brilliant, authority-challenging, short-story-telling, self-sacrificing, bring-the-children-to-Me . . . healer.

Proverbs says to ask for wisdom. Wisdom means perspective. It means knowing what matters.

(There’ve been many who’ve reached thousands for Christ who’ve been found out as utter frauds. In the Old Testament, God once spoke through a jackass, and yes, He’s still doing it.)

We’re all ultimately incompatible. If I were to meet my exact clone, it would just be a matter of time before I and me would go our separate ways.

There’s an old song about how breaking up is “hard to do,” but you know what’s harder than breaking up? Not breaking up.

Yes, the wounds are real, but you know what? Healing is real too.

I get the impression from Scripture that God would rather be in communication with an immature, selfish person than be ignored by a theologically fastidious one.

From what I’ve seen, the world is deeply, profoundly broken (even my atheist friends allow this), and every human I’ve ever gotten to know turns out to have issues. We’re inconsistent, in certain circumstances untrustworthy, and we don’t even live up to our own standards, let alone God’s.

He knows what it’s like to be misunderstood. No one—not even His closest friends—understood Him.

What if an aching dissatisfaction, even frustration, might be evidence of a right relationship with God?

The absence of feeling is not the absence of love.

Our feelings have nothing to do with whether God loves us or is still involved in our lives.

decide means: “to cut off.” It’s from the same root as scissors.

...so many of us are one way skeptics. We find that religion "doesn't work" without seeing the obvious: irreligion doesn't work either.

Here she (Teresa of Calcutta) was, an outspoken follower of Jesus on an international stage, but when it came to warm, religious feelings, she had nothing. And that bothered her deeply. she kept serving the poor, kept praying, kept leading but she confided in her letters to confessors that she also felt like God had abandoned her. She wrote that "the silence and emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.

Every now and then we'll ask listeners on our radio show, "What if you were trapped on an elevator with Jesus? What if you knew it would be a couple hours before the rescue crew got there? You could talk about anything. What would you ask Him?" Most people want to ask about pain and suffering and why God allows it. Or they want to know how their grandma's doing. That kind of thing. Fair enough, but I know what I would want to ask Him. If I could choke out the question, I'd want to ask this: "Am I a fraud? Please tell me I'm not. Please tell me You're proud of me. Please tell me You know I struggle, but no, I'm not a fraud at all. I'd love to hear it.

You know that feeling when God is right there, this close, and you can just feel His loving arms around you, and you can literally hear His voice whispering in your ear, telling you how much He loves you? I don't. I never have.

When Jesus walked among us, it’s how He demonstrated His very identity: A lame man walks. A girl is raised from the dead. No, I do not want to walk away from this. On the contrary, I want to be part of it.

One thing that works, and it’s something I can do even while alone in the car: I can pray for my enemies. Jesus told us to do it. Difficulty level: 10.

I have to serve someone, somehow. Now.

Prayer is a big deal. It changes the world. There’s power in prayer. It’s also a big guilt-trip for me, because I’m terrible at it. It’s embarrassing. I’m in my forties. I always thought that I’d be good at this by now.

But if I actually do something that cuts against the grain of my natural tendency, well, that sounds like obedience, which God apparently regards as pretty spectacular, indeed.