Notes from a Dork

I recently found my journal from last year and realized how much I missed regularly writing and what it did for me. I want to start up again, but use this blog instead, which means I'll have to be vulnerable. That's fine.

But first I'm going to post a few excerpts from my old journal. I'll skip the banal ones and the freaky ones.

3/24/07

So I'm thinking about writing an article and trying to get it published by The Burnside Writer's Collective, the group Donald Miller started with friends. I want the article to reflect some of the thoughts in my last journal entry* - that there's a large segment of people in the church who've been marginalized, but they have no name.

No one really ever talks about the oddballs. We talk of misfits in reference to children, but it's as if, at some certain but undefined age, that term/classification/feeling/state of being magically melts away. But it doesn't.

Every church has a few people that don't fit anywhere. They're the excessive talkers, the completely withdrawn, the emotionally unbalanced, the paranoid, the angry, the negative, and those who have need of drugs to aid them in coping with everyday life (and I'm not referring to medicine for a physical ailment). They are the ones who dress oddly (but not to be oddly fashionable), who have poor hygiene, who cling, who champion bizarre ideas or dogma. They are either too draining or too embarrassing to be around. We don't know how to love them, because we can't get past our uncomfortableness. Or, if we have tried to love them, they have repeatedly frustrated us and strained our sympathies to the point of giving way. Our ability to identify with them has been outreached, and our sense of responsibility to them has been exhausted.

I am one of them, yet I struggle to love other ones that I meet. And either I learn to love them as I should, or I give up hope that anyone will love me as I need. It is time to learn.

*The journal entry was rather freaky, so I won't scare you with it. Part of it, however, talked about feeling marginalized because I'm socially retarded. "To marginalize someone is 'to relegate or confine to a lower or outer limit or edge, as of social standing.'"

Oh, and by the way, I never did write that article, though I did have some interesting discussion with Pastor Steve in the way of "researching" for it. :)