Friday, March 22, 2013

Perfect People and Weird People

On nearly-successive days, I read a complaint about churches because the people there expected everyone to be perfect/conformist/respectable followed by a verbal comment that there were too many weird people at most churches, by which I think the speaker meant socially-clumsy, overbearing, or unfashionable somehow.

Though this is a contradiction, there is truth in both complaints, and I don't know the solution.  I could lump them both under the category of "they're not cool," or "not up-to-date," but that's only part of it.  We are too tolerant and not tolerant enough; our expectations are too high and too low.  There is a balance that we miss, objecting to the wrong things, reinforcing the wrong things.

I suppose the simplest answer is that we all come from those categories, believing we should be perfect but being too weird to get that quite right.

2 comments:

  1. I would just file this under "You can't please everybody."

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  2. And I can resemble both sides of the equation/inequality. I been working on weird most my life, trying to stay closer to "a little off".

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