To wake the giant inside ourselves, we have to be faithful to our own eccentric nature, and bring it out into conversation with the world.He talks about how some people are asleep in their vocations. We know these people, especially when they are our leaders. They are the people who we know we can no longer count on to provide vision, support, or direction. We have all probably been asleep in some job at some point, I know I certainly have. But what I love about this idea even more than the call to wake up, is what Whyte calls his readers to wake up to - our unique, eccentric, made in the image of God, self. I think this is such a hard concept to consider as a born and bred Christian. I have been taught all of my life to die to my self, not to be faithful to it. So, for my Christian world view, I have to understand such a statement in different language - I have to to be faithful to the person God created me to be, that is marred by sin, and redeemed by the resurrection of the divinely human Jesus Christ. I live, we all live, on the resurrection side of the redemptive cross, which means that I am called to die no more, but to live in Christ, the savior that redeemed me so that I could live as God created me to be - my self.
In my morning hours, I dwelt on the idea of conversation with the world. It reminds me of the attachment theories I am learning in school that describe how an infant is formed by their interaction with their environment. Their first environment is their mother, then the father and siblings that they gradually become aware of, then there are peers and eventually a spouse or intimate relationship. We are in constant conversation with the people around us, and those conversations shape who we are and who we become. I have spent two years trudging through the pains and the blessings of how my conversations with the people of my life have shaped me. I have been learning how to have new conversations with these important people. But this path can tow a very tight line with complete self-absorption, and I am ready to start having conversations with the world.
As I consider my past conversations with the world, they were often extremely conforming. I was agreeable to everything I felt I was supposed to agree about, and I hated everything I thought I was supposed to hate. Over the past few years, all that changed, and I have been very angry, and all of the sudden my conformist conversations turned into fighting and disagreement. I am beginning to grow weary of fighting, and there is no way I will go back to conforming. As I talked through these thoughts with a friend, she pointed out that both fighting and conforming are reactive ways of being, and therefore neither are living out of faithfulness to my self. I have gone from extreme of reaction to the other extreme, and now I am ready to start settling into who I am.
This is the beginning of my conversation with the world about maturity as opposed to reactivity. It is still hard to fathom that the world would want to converse with me, which I suppose will have to be part of the conversation, but this is about seeking to be part of the world as a unique woman who knows she has something to offer the world.
