Excerpt from:
Meditations for Misfits: Finding Your
Place in the Family of God
Why Not Me?
Sometimes I lie awake at night and ask, “Why me?” Then a voice answers, “Nothing personal, your name just happened to come up.”
—Charles Schulz
One of my favorite “Peanuts” comic strips, long lost on a calendar circa 1971, showed Charlie Brown in musing mode, probably standing by Lucy’s psychiatry stand. He asks something like, “Is it true that out of your entire life, one day will be better than all the rest?” In the second frame, ever logical Lucy assures him that the statement is indeed true. The third frame depicts a still-musing Charlie. “What if you’ve already had it?” he asks in defeat in the final frame.
Imagine being Charlie’s age and having such a gloomy approach to the rest of your life. I did. Imagine it, that is, as that calendar page confronted me for an entire month. Schulz, I knew, had hit on something elemental in human nature, as he did with so many of his Peanuts strips. Like Charlie, at times I would wonder if the best had already passed; I wanted to return to a time when I was much younger than Charlie, in years and in spirit. Like Charlie, I seemed to have acquired an old soul at an early age.
Not longer after that calendar year, I returned to the faith of my childhood, a belief in a personal God who loved me and cared about me. But once the blush of that new love had faded, I began asking the ultimate pity-party question: “Why me?” Why do I have to be the one to always accommodate other people, always forgive other people, always be nice to other people, for heaven’s sake? Why do all these crummy things happen to me, and why do I have to always take it like a good little Christian? And why, oh why, did You make me so weird?
Twenty years ago I might not have appreciated the answer Schulz got when he asked that question. Today, I not only love it, I believe it. My name just happened to come up. It was nothing personal, nothing intended to make my life miserable, nothing that would indicate that God loved me any less than the rest of humanity. My name just happened to come up. In other words, why not me?
If you’ve been asking God “Why
me?” you’re probably asking the wrong question. The way I see it these days, it matters very little why you and I are the way we are. Once we acknowledge that, the question becomes one for ourselves and not for God: OK, it does not matter why I’m this way. The question is, What am I going to do about it?
You are the only one who can give a satisfying answer to that. But you may have to ask a series of other questions before you do, like: What do I have to gain by resisting my true nature? Do I want to spend the rest of my life trying to change for the sake of some arbitrary definition of normal? What’s the worst that could happen if I embraced my distinctions and lived an authentic life in harmony with them?
Sure, those questions are loaded, weighted in favor of being true to yourself. But you know what? Trying to be what you are not never gets any easier; it only gets more difficult and more frustrating. And you know what else? It’s nothing personal. Your name just happened to come up, and it’s a name God loves as much as any other.
“I know that You can do everything
And that no purpose of Yours can be withheld from You.
You asked, 'Who is this who hides counsel without knowledge?'
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”
—Job 42:2-3 NKJV
Lord, show me what You want me to do about the nature You have placed within
me—and keep reminding me not to take it out on You.
Want to read another?
Click
here
Return to Top
