Road Warriors: Amos—A Message of Justice - Thursday
2 Corinthians 6:17
“Come out from them and be separate, says the Lord… and I will receive you.” (NIV)
We struggle with being “different,” don’t we? Teenagers are particularly prone to standing out in a crowd, yet they invariably run with the crowd; I’ve always found that an interesting anomaly. Some of my worst childhood memories go back to the fear of being unpopular, and I fretted, more than I care to admit, about unwittingly earning the label “uncool.”
I read recently about a guy who described one of his worst childhood experiences; see if you can relate. He said, “My family didn’t have a lot of money, so I never had the coolest name-brand clothes. One year, my parents bought me two pairs of Sears Toughskin jeans for school, a brown pair and a blue pair. All the cool kids had Levis with the silver or red tabs and Nikes to match. I had two pairs of Toughskins and one pair of Stride Rite tennis shoes that needed to last all year. Both pairs of jeans wore a hole in the seat area, so my mom, who was big into cross-stitching, sewed an American flag patch over each one. To this day, I can still hear kids pledging allegiance to my rear end. I vowed that I would never face that kind of rejection again” (paraphrased from The Seven Checkpoints by Andy Stanley, p. 116).
How about you? What made you “uncool?” For me, it was when I became a Christian during my junior year of high school. Most of my friends dropped me like a lead balloon. Those were the days of “Make love, not war,” and my new-found moral rectitude didn’t fit my friends’ expectations. I felt like the prophet standing in the wilderness crying, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.” But here’s what I came to understand: If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. And having guardrails in my life didn’t restrict me; they protected me, and I liked that. I’m sure the prophet Amos, whom we’ve been thinking about this week, felt the same way.
Here’s the takeaway: By all means, be you… especially the you God made you to be… and never, ever apologize for it.
Thursday’s Reflection
There’s an old poem that comes to mind that speaks to this—you can enjoy it here.
