She will be odd

“Either she will be odd, or she will make herself the same as them.”

“I felt the same way about my kid going there, but between odd and the same, you got to be rooting for odd, don’t ya?”

One of the best lines from a movie full of great lines. A movie that portrays almost every emotion and human relationship I have ever experienced in my short, sheltered life and some that I still haven’t. One of the best movies I have seen in a very long time. A great movie despite starring Adam Sandler (Adam Sandler of Waterboy fame).

Spanglish is a great movie. If you haven’t seen it, go! Go now and rent it from Blockbuster. Then sit down and think about your life, the decisions you are making and will make, and decided what you want to be, what is going to define you, and what is important.

There are so many complex levels in this movie, you can’t even began to explain them. But if I was a movie critic, or maybe even a philosophy guru, I would start by explaining each relationship. I would look at the marriage, the parents and kids (all three of those relationships), the wife and the housekeeper, the husband and the housekeeper, the housekeeper and their kids, and all the smaller interactions, and with each of those, an entire picture, a complete idea of human life, of psychology, of world view and culture would present itself in vivid color and magnificent clarity. I would write a book and enlighten the world about itself. But I am neither of those things and so all of these musings are probably grossly obtuse and remarkably trite.

“She will be odd, or she will make herself the same as them.” Isn’t that the dilemma that we all face in this world? I was made unique. Someone up somewhere designed me in a way that is so different and so unique that I have no option other than those. How could I have missed that before today? Why is it that some other writer, some other person got that and it took this movie to make it a reality in my life? Movies really are becoming the art of our time. I am moved more by a good movie than almost anything else. Sadly, more moved by a movie than even the Word of God.

I was reading something just a few hours ago and the author was talking about believing the Bible as the Word of God. The start of studying it and therefore maturing and growing as a Christian (something that I would like to do, or at least say I would) begins with truly believing it is what it says it is. If you can’t do that then, stop the presses, everything else is inconsequential. What is the point of maturing and growing if all that maturity and growth is built on a false foundation? So I assume that I believe it, but the earlier mentioned writer’s test is extreme. He said that it isn’t a belief unless you are willing to stake your life on it. And I don’t think you can have something extreme like that just any day, maybe only once in what would then become a prematurely ended lifetime. I see a Catch 22, how about you?

This feeds into something else I read. CS Lewis, in A Grief Observed, said;

“Apparently it’s like that. Your bid—for God or no God, for good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity—will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world. Nothing less will shake a man—or at any rate a man like me—out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the
truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.”

So it is torture! Torture will bring about the belief that I think I desire. That sucks! Maybe Lewis is wrong, but I doubt it. I doubt it not because he is one smart cookie, but because I have read the same idea in different book, collection of books that is.

Circular! Circular is the reasoning I am back to. You can’t believe everything you read, but you can read something that is believable, I think. We could twist on this idea for another few hours, but that would make for a long post and I really want to get back to a previous thought, so let’s make one assumption, it is the Word of God.

Since I, which obviously includes you too, was made unique, there is the option to do nothing and be “odd”, or choose, make a conscience decision, to make oneself be same. So when it says, “do not be conformed” what it means is, do not make yourself conformed. But can I say that with any even remote certainty? Making the assumption that I am accurate, then it makes things a lot clearer. It makes the other places that say I am not of this world, and the ones that say I will be hated, more understandable.

If I don’t choose to make myself same, then the odd will be rejected, loathed, even hated. It always has been, from the first day of The Rebellion till now. So is that what I, we, want? Is anyone even making a bid for those answers? If you aren’t then nothing I just wrote makes since and why should it; why should the general musings to answer a question unasked make sense?

Everyone is thinking about being odd or being same though. It is a part of human nature to do so. The grander questions about someone or something else out there may escape our daily meanderings, but asking why you are the way you are and why no one understands you don’t. Everyone realizes at one time or another that they are different. We obviously look different, but there is a deeper difference. As much as we try to fit in and “make ourselves same,” we can’t because we can’t undue something that we didn’t do in the first place.

We are different because we where made that way and the sooner I accept that, the sooner I can embrace it and thrive. I hope you get what I am saying.

It is tomorrow.

Jason