The Calm Before the Storm

Oswald Chambers Daily Devotion (My Utmost for His Highest) – September 11

Watch the kind of people God brings around you, and you will be humiliated to find that this is His way of revealing to you the kind of person you have been to Him. – Oswald Chambers

Wow! This is the statement that popped out at me when I read this devotion the other day. I thought to myself, “really? This is how I’ve been to Him?”

Then I got distracted and made it about me. My mind quickly went to all the people who had ever disappointed me. The list is just too long.

If you’ve spent any length of time getting to know people, you WILL be disappointed. And, maybe “disappointed” is the wrong word. Maybe you have flat out been hurt by a friend. Maybe they’ve betrayed you in some way. Maybe they turned their back on you, or lashed out against you in a way that even your worst enemies wouldn’t have considered. Just ask someone who’s recently broken up from a relationship, or a parent who’s child wants nothing to do with them, or a grown adult who was molested by a close family member at a young age. Ask them if they’ve been disappointed by the people in their life. Ask them if they’ve been hurt by someone close to them…by someone that they loved.

I thought about the people I’ve surrounded myself with over the years.

Birds of a feather, flock together (I took this photo in the Outer Banks in '07)

My 11th Birthday - Don't let the smile fool you...it was my nightmare year of middle school.

My sixth grade year was perhaps the hardest year for me – socially speaking. It was a year of dichotomous proportions. I was going through puberty. My voice was changing and I was breaking out with the nastiest zits in the world. Well maybe not the nastiest. Although it seemed I was ahead of the curve in this regard, I remember another guy who was going through this change too…but he was even more progressive than I was. This was a good thing for me because that took the attention off of me…but I still got my share of ridicule.

Despite these physical changes, I was still a relatively popular kid. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t the #1 or #2 most popular boy…but I was definitely in the top 10. I know this for a fact because that was the year that the Top 10 popularity survey went around school. There was one for each grade, and that year, being determined by the cutest, most popular girls in our class, I made the list!

So it should’ve been a good year for me – but it wasn’t. The reason it has been forever etched in my mind as the worst year of my social career is because I never knew what the day would bring. For example, one day during first period, it was smooth sailing. Kali, the cute gymnast in our class, passed me a note, asking me if I wanted to be her girlfriend.

(YES PLEASE). But by sixth period, Social Studies, I was the focal point of jokes by my “best friends” (#1, #2, and #5) who decided that talking in asian voices with their eyes stretched to a slant was hilarious. I put on a brave face and retorted with comments like, “that’s not even funny guys”, or “you guys are stupid, can’t you come up with something original?”, but if they could’ve seen what I was thinking, they would have seen a little boy who wanted to run home and cry in his closet.

Oh, and that note from the cute girl, asking me to go out with her? That was part of the joke too. It was all part of a grander scheme to ridicule me and make me look stupid.

Mission accomplished.

Finding out that bit of information was enough to make me want to transfer schools. Ironically, I ended up dating her in 9th and 11th grades just a few years later, and she was the first girl I ever kissed. And judging by her technique, I was her first kiss too.

Me at 11 yrs old in DC with the family

When I stop to think about how those “friends” treated me in sixth grade, it actually brings back feelings of shame, embarrassment, hurt, and anger. They were cruel. The thing that gets me is why did I choose to call them my friends? Why did I choose to be around them over another group of friends who would’ve respected me and esteemed me? It’s sad, even at a young age, I valued fame, power, and popularity over what I knew to be the best for me in my life. Where does that come from?

But the point is, people are cruel and mean. They act out of cowardice and fear. Those boys didn’t want to be the center of negative attention, so what they did is found people around them to make fun of, so that the attention would be diverted off of them. Maybe they had older brothers who treated them this way (actually I know for a fact that they did), and so they were simply a product of their own environments, perpetuating a negative behavior to take out their own frustrations. There are tons of other motivators and triggers for the reasons why we treat people poorly, but the fact of the matter is, we’ve all done it in some fashion or another.

It’s easy to recall the hurt that’s been done to you, but it’s not as easy to remember the pain we’ve brought on others – mostly because we’re not on that end of things. We can’t know the pain we’ve caused someone else because we’re not the ones experiencing it.

Have you ever stopped to think about how we’ved done this to Jesus? We’ve “broken up” with Him, we’ve turned our backs on Him, we’ve mocked Him, and worse. We’ve done the unthinkable to our Lord and Savior, and often don’t think twice about it. If we lived in Jesus’ day, there’s a good chance that most of us would have been the ones spitting in His face and shouting “Crucify Him!” as He dragged the cross to His impending death.

What kind of people are you being surrounded by? Is it a reflection of who you are? If they aren’t quality people, why are you choosing to be around them? If you don’t like what you see, consider how their attitudes and behaviors might mirror your own behaviors to your close and personal friend, Christ.

Stay away from a foolish man,
for you will not find knowledge on his lips. – Proverbs 14:7

He who walks with the wise grows wise,
but a companion of fools suffers harm. – Proverbs 13:20