When I Feel Different from Everyone Else

Devotional

Everybody else seems to know what to say.

They laugh at the same jokes. They like the same stuff. It's like they all got handed a set of instructions and somehow yours never came.

So you sit at the lunch table or stand off to the side of the playground and think, why am I so different?

And then you start hiding the parts of you that seem weird. You fold yourself up smaller so nobody notices.

But what if the thing you're hiding is something God put there on purpose?

Listen to what the psalm says: "I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made."

He didn't say "wonderfully made, just like everybody else." He said he, specifically, was made with care.

The stuff that makes you different isn't a mistake at the factory. It's part of the design.

Paul explains this using a body, and it's kind of great.

"God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be?"

Picture a body that's nothing but eyes. Just eyes. It could see really well. It could not run, or hold a fork, or hear music.

A body needs different parts. That's the whole point of a body.

"God arranged" them. Your spot isn't random. Somebody chose it.

And here's something worth getting straight, because these two things sound the same but they're not.

Fitting in is not the same as belonging.

Fitting in means become like everybody else and then we'll let you stay.

Belonging means you're wanted the way you already are.

The world offers fitting in. God offers belonging.

"You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God."

A household is a family. Strangers try to fit in. Family just belongs.

And how did you get in the family? Not by being normal enough.

Jesus came for outsiders. He ate dinner with the people the religious crowd wouldn't sit near. He touched the people everybody else stepped around. And he died outside the city walls, in the place for people who don't belong.

He got put out so you could be brought in.

Then Peter says this about you: "You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession."

Chosen. Royal. Holy. His.

Those aren't words for somebody who barely made it in.

So the next time you feel different, don't shrink.

You don't have to become a copy of the kid next to you.

Your spot was picked by God himself, and one lonely afternoon can't take it from you.

You're not a stranger.

You're home.