With a move to a new city, assuming a new job, making new acquaintances/friends, and unloading oneself into a new living space, there is always the desire to mark this relocation with some level of lifechange. A change of behavior, a change of conduct, a change of mindset ... this, at least, is what I often seek to accomplish. In my never-ending quest to be genuine yet new in every season of life, I often find myself disappointed with how much my new position begins to immediately look very much like my old ones.
Why can't I change? A friend of mine, Myles, recently wrestled with the concept of transformation on his blog, and indeed, this is what I truly desire, I believe, at the heart of relocation. To transform and in so doing transcend my current surroundings - to stand above them, unfazed, yet pour this new, noble, genuine self into all that is around me.
A forced transformation is no transformation at all, but an indignantly-worn disguise of who I really am. Such a disguise is stressful, on one extreme, and on the other, the lows of realizing how little I have changed brings with it a much more melancholy stress.
It's dumb - plain ol' dumb - to try to force anything, mainly because we have been created a certain way, to be a certain kind of person, and the task is not to overcome who we are, but learn how to compromise who we are (even the rough, unpopular, unpristine edges of ourselves) with the world around us, no matter where we end up for however long. To attempt anything else is to be off-balance, off-kilter.
So let me be dumb if I am dumb, but not in the way that tries to pretend I'm not. Even as I grow and mature, let me be a bit of a dunce always nonetheless. Let me accept who I am and be taught that if who I am is good enough for God, it should certainly be good enough for me.
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