A Piece of the Wrong Puzzle: On Fitting In & Faith

I never seemed to fit.   

From the kids at school to church to society's expectations to my own family, I never seemed to fit in.  I never felt right.  Everything about me seemed wrong -- too-frizzy hair, bad skin, big teeth, pudgy but yet somehow still gangly, and socially awkward to the extreme.  I felt like a puzzle piece trying to squash myself into the wrong puzzle.  

No one, I felt, could ever like me, much less love me.  I would chastise myself for even hoping for such a thing.  It was, I knew, impossible.

When I got curious about God and began to read the Bible, I found that Jesus seemed to have a thing for people like me -- for the people who didn't seem to fit, people who maybe were a lot like me.  

I began to wonder.  

A decade later, God has healed me of a lot of my sense of being-wrong, of not-being-loveable.  I have run up the unconditional love of my God, my husband and his family, and my church family too often to remain unchanged.  Over the past year especially, I have felt like I have finally found the right puzzle.  

Then Eve died, and everything changed.

Where did I fit into this world?  Where does someone like me, a mother of a dead child, go?  What kind of a puzzle is there for her . . . ?  

 

Today I am writing over at Still Standing Magazine!  

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