I showed up two days late. I was wearing a t-shirt with a giant tweety bird on the front of it with matching tweety bird print cotton shorts that were very possibly viewed as pajama shorts. Not exactly how you should probably start out junior high.
That first day was hard to say the least. All my peers {including familiar friends from elementary school, had already worked out some of those first day hiccups. I was just now experiencing them. I’m not sure if it was while I sat next to the kids with a mustache who’d already done his share of 7th grade…a couple times, or if it was sitting among a huge classroom full of nothing but other 7th grade girls. They all seemed to know exactly who they were, or at least who they wanted to be. Confidence oozed whither they were strut’n a ‘stache or rock’n a new do while singing. {as much as a 7th grader can really strut and rock in their lankiness- but I didn’t know that then}
Not me. Sitting in my cartoon-clad, cotton monstrosity, I was very aware that I didn’t even have enough confidence in who I was to tell my grandmother, while birthday clothes shopping, I was sorta…fading out of my Tweety phase.
As I trudged through 7th grade I tried to find myself; not only in my new found fashion sense {or at least awareness} but in the, I’m-now-a-Christ-follower sense.
God’s timing is so perfect. What an amazing time to have found Christ- Old enough to understand larger concepts of lordship but not so set too much in my selfish this-is-who-I-am personality that I was still moldable.
After my backseat conversion, realized I couldn’t just live as an ‘undercover’ Christian. God has set me apart. There is no way for me to blend in; fly under the radar; be just like everyone else ever again. Working my way through junior high as well as high school, I joined every Christian group I could find trying to be apart of the greater story I wanted to be a part of so desperately.
Now, there is nothing wrong with Christian clubs and organizations but somehow this way of organizing my ‘faith’ wasn’t as extreme as I dreamed. It seemed to help me compartmentalize God in a separate box from everything else in my life. It wasn’t as unmistakable as the Bible described. I was gaining much-needed discipline in my life but not living the adventure that is the Christian life.
Awe, poor junior high, just another part of God drawing me closer to him.
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