Individuality

"There comes a time when you have to stand up and shout: This is me, damn it! I look the way I look, think the way I think, feel the way I feel, love the way I love! I am a whole complex package. Take me . . . or leave me. Accept me or walk away! Do not try to make me feel like less of a person just because I don't fit your idea of who I should be and don't try to change me to fit your mold. If I need to change, I alone will make that decision. When you are strong enough to love yourself 100%, good and bad, you will be amazed at the opportunities that life presents you," Stacey Charter. (I googled Stacey Charter, by the way. She's a breast cancer survivor who happens to have some pretty good quotes running around the web.)

How American can you get, right? Land of rugged individuality that we are, non-conformity is one of our national virtues, right along with tolerance. Let me be me, and I'll let you be you. Oswald, however, describes individuality as "all elbows, it separates and isolates."

The companion Bible verse to today's reading is Matthew 16:24: "Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.'" The following verse elaborates: "'For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.'"

Deny myself. Lose my life. What is Christ asking of me? Surely, he is the one who made me unique. Next to the much-touted snowflake, human beings are an infinitely grander tribute to his limitless creativity, and partly for that reason, I don't think he's asking me not to be me or to try to be somebody else. I heard a pastor once say, "When you meet God, he's not going to ask you why you weren't more like Moses or David. He's going to ask you, why weren't you more like Barbara?" Maybe I just want to believe that, but the remainder of today's entry gives me hope that the issue at stake here is not really the end of Barbara, but the beginning.

"Individuality counterfeits personality." Peeking ahead, I see that tomorrow's reading deals with personality, so until then . . .

Barbara