By Comparison.

What to do when what you do isn’t what everyone else is doing.

At the end of October, we had a Halloween dodgeball tournament at my University. I played in it with a team dressed as Mormons, and frankly it was a blast, even though we lost in our second game to a team of Brentwood moms. After it was all over, the “basic white girls” emerged victorious and everyone started leaving. I realized it was only 10pm, everyone around me had plans for the night*, and I didn’t. Honestly, I thought only freshman got nervous about stuff like that, but I was wrong.

I like to think I’m relatively independent of people’s opinions of me, but I didn’t want to be the guy who spent his Friday night sitting in a dorm room alone. However, I ended up going back to change, and I thought about my choice a little bit. I hadn’t had a chance to read that day, nor had I gotten a good amount of sleep in the two weeks before. I doubt most people would notice stuff like that, but frankly I’ve learned I function a lot better if I keep up with them. Rather than running around trying to find friends to hang out with, I started reading around 10:30, made it to bed by 11:30, and got a full 12 hours of sleep.

There are days I genuinely think I’m an incredible human being. I’ve probably gotten through more books in the past twelve months than most people read in the twelve years of their primary school education. I’m a tour guide at Lipscomb and I’m on an organization that serves our University’s president. If you look at my resume, my calendar, or my life I’ll likely impress you, and frankly, that can go to my head sometimes.

I’ve put so much effort into making my life into an effective and impressive one, and yet I could be so wrong about it. Day after day, I say “no” to what everyone else is doing so that I can say “yes” to hours of reading, or being on a healthy sleep cycle, or training myself to be a man of character for the sake of my future. However, I’m terrified at the prospect of getting to be 40 years old, looking back at my college career, and thinking it was all just a waste of time.

I remember in 7th grade, my dad started bringing me to the gym with him. He also made me bring a clipboard with a sheet to keep track of the weight I was lifting. Frankly, my dad is jacked, and it’s because he gets up at 4am every day to go lift. As a 7th grader, I could barely bench the bar. He saw me looking back and forth from what I was benching to what he was benching and instantly knew what was going through my head.

He told me I was only allowed to compare myself to one person, and that person was who I was the week before. The reason he had me bring the clipboard was not just busy work. Every time I saw people curling or squatting easily two or three times what I could, he wanted me to look back at the sheets from previous workouts.

As long as I could see improvement, I was successful.

Comparison is the thief of all joy, and in my mind, the beginning of all self doubt. There are days when I think I’m the greatest person on the planet, and days when I feel like I’m probably the worst. However, both that pride and that self deprecation were created relative to other people. I’ve spent so much time basing my judgement of my own actions on what other people are doing or what they think of me. There’s wisdom in taking counsel from friends, but I also can’t get down on myself just because I’m not making the same choice my friends would in the same situation.

9 For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them — though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. (1 Corinthians 15:9–10).

That’s a quote from a guy named Paul. He wrote the majority of the New Testament of the Bible, but before he converted, his life’s work was killing Christians. From the moment he entered the church, Paul faced opposition to his ministry from within and without. He was abandoned by multiple ministry partners, and spent the last part of his life in jail. He knew a good bit about what it meant to have people dislike what he was doing. And yet, he says “by the grace of God I am what I am.”

In light of his past, Paul was striving to do the right thing in terms of his ministry. It would have been easy for him to measure his success by the number of people supporting him. Frankly, he didn’t have too many of those, and yet he praises God for who he was. He had good reason too, as he had started churches across Europe and the middle east. Either way, any change in him wasn’t a result of his work, but rather came from God bringing about righteousness. For me, this has been a reminder that the opinion of the general population is not always a very good meter for whether or not He is changing me.

I spend a lot of time worrying if I’m doing the right thing in life. I also spend a lot of time working to be the best that I can, but frankly I’m learning to rest in the fact that any change in me is a result of the Spirit of God at work. In both my spiritual life and life in general, I can’t allow myself to measure what He’s doing by how other people see it. It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try though. I think Paul knew he had a long way to go with much growth still ahead of him. However, I think in any consideration of his flaws, Paul would have said “By the grace of God I am what I am”.

I’m not going to solve this problem overnight, but at the very least I think that verse may just be a new motto for me. If I keep it at the back of my mind, hopefully I won’t feel so bad the next time I take a night to myself. Then, I should feel pretty ok when I have to say no to hanging out with friends for the sake of reading. If I can keep it in the back of my mind after then, then maybe I’ll actually end up feeling pretty good about doing something even though it’s not necessarily “cool”. Honestly, it’s not as much about getting to be perfect at this though. It’s just like my dad said: As long as I can see improvement, I’ll be successful.

*Author’s note — entirely off topic, but it’s worth mentioning the variety of plans people had after the dodgeball tournament. I heard everything from “eating pizza and playing board games” to “watching a movie and eating pizza” to “getting wasted and eating pizza”. We could all learn something from the way dodgeball and pizza can bring us all together.

Originally published at theforlornemoose.wordpress.com on December 8, 2016.