A place to belong
Have you ever gone somewhere and felt just totally out of place? Well there’s two places that do it to me almost every time. One… the auto parts store.
I mean, you walk in and everyone is dressed kinda the same, many times the people working there know the guy in front of you and its like everyone in there is talking about a 440 dual overhead injector thingamajig or that monster 220 intake panel assembly or something like that. Then here I am. All I know is I need an air filter for my truck because they didn’t have the one the book said I needed at Wal-Mart. I don’t know. Maybe its just me. But I feel like a little kid sometimes and all the adults know whats going on and I don’t.
Then there’s the music store. I really like going to the music store and checking out new guitars and such. But once again, you walk in and everyone sort of looks the same. They sort of dress the same. And without fail the guy with his hair pulled back in a pony tail is going to come over and ask if you need any help. Which isn’t a BAD thing. Except I’m trying to kinda look like I know what I’m doing for some reason or another, and if he starts talking to me… well… It will be obvious I don’t. Because here again, they are talking about solid tops and light strings and maple something… and all I know is… that one over there sure is pretty. I will admit. I’m beginning to be able to go in and not feel stupid. Partly because I have been learning to actually play the guitar and partly because I know half the people who work at the music store. But I still remember the first time I walked in…
Well, today I discovered a new place. You see I had this old metal shed in my backyard and maybe a month or two ago this massive windstorm came through and destroyed it. Of course it WAS pretty rusted. So this weekend I finally get all the pieces loaded up into my truck and check when the county landfill closes. Drat… it closed 30 minutes ago. So I decide tomorrow, which is of course today, I will go to this place I drive by everyday. Its a recycling center. Maybe they will take it off my hands. As soon as I pull up that feeling of… you don’t belong here begins. I mean, I’m in slacks, dress shoes, a dress shirt and tie. I walk in and people are doing the stuff your suppose to do. The guy behind the counter is saying hello to the people by first name… they all know each other.
Finally he looks up, “Um can I help you.�
“Yeah, do yall take stuff like an old metal shed.â€? …. “Yeeeees…â€? said kinda slow and sarcastic… “thats what we do, recycle metal.â€?
So I finally get through the process of getting a ticket and weighing my truck (It weighs 4,080 pounds btw). Then the scale person just waves me through and is like, “Ok, go aheadâ€? Of course I have to ask, “Go ahead WHERE?â€? once again speaking to me slowly and with a slight eye roll almost like “sheesh, everyone knows that. What are you an idiot?â€? So I drive around back where I was instructed. No one meets me, no one is around except some other guy whos unloading his truck. So I ask him “Hey, do we just dump this stuff anywhere?â€?… Yep, So I unload my truck. Good thing the gloves where still in the front. Of course I’m wearing black shoes and light tan slacks and I live in Georgia: home of red clay. So my shoes are covered in red clay dust as are my pants but hey, I get the stuff unloaded.
Finally back to the scale, back inside, receiving wonderful personal directions as to what to do next… and I walk out with a ten dollar check. Not too bad I guess since I was taking to the landfill to begin with.
Driving back to the office I begin to think of church. Ok so I know, it seems everything I do always leads me back to thinking about church. I can’t help it. That whole feeling of, you don’t belong. I bet that happens a LOT at church. Imagine walking in, everyone is dressed the same, everyone seems to know everyone else, everyone knows the liturgy of the service. And you know, even if you aint a liturgical church… you have a liturgy.
You kinda stumble your way through the service. You have to ask where to take the kids, where to get coffee, where are the bathrooms… I’ve been to a bunch of churches where I was the odd man out. Thats why I love my church. We have to be the most diverse church in the area: Racially, socially, economically. Some people dress up, some don’t. There’s people with tattoos and eyebrow rings, there’s the guys who ride their Harley’s to church, there’s the preppy looking people and the skater looking people. Blacks, Whites, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian. People from Africa, South America, Jamaica, Alabama…. We are fairly close to an Air Force base so we have people from all over the states. It really is an amazing place to come worship. But even with that. We fall into the trap of assuming people know what we are about. Or we assume they know what we mean when we say certain things.
Ok so I’m not real sure WHERE I was going with all that… I believe we just need to make a place where people belong. Not a place of isolation of elitism. But rather simply a place to belong.
March 14th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
I agree. In fact, we get to the point where we don\’t even know some of what we mean. But more often we are just not thinking about others, so we don\’t think they may have questions. We are doing our thing; they are scenery.
March 14th, 2006 at 4:41 pm
that reminds me of something Donald Miller said at the Catalyst Conference…
Sometimes we think the whole world is a movie about me. I’m the main character and everyone else are just extras.
Or something like that
March 14th, 2006 at 9:07 pm
[…] The point is we have made something shorter and easier and it lost the meaning. This is something like Becoming’s post. I feel like we do this so much, and I don’t even know if it can be stopped. I don’t like losing meaning. Maybe it is about education. I’m sure a lot of people who say PIN number don’t really know what PIN means, but they know it’s a number. I guess we need to explain things better, so we don’t end up making people feel stupid like in Reflections. And, maybe so we don’t lose the depth of meaning that we should have when we say something. Then we may keep from repeating the events in our history where two groups will agree on a word with different meanings and persecute a third who won’t use the word. […]