Do You Fit In?

[HKHaugan]

When I moved to New York City from North Carolina as a young teenager I lived on the 6th floor of a tenement walkup on the edge of East Harlem. Even though I had been born in Brooklyn to an immigrant Norwegian family, we had moved to North Carolina when I was very young with very little memory of my earliest years. So that northern move was a real culture shock for me. From a rural red clay, grits accent and Dixie feeling it didn’t take long for me to literally be beaten into submission in gang fashion. It’s all about the kids on the block, sitting on the stoop, speaking and looking tough. You don’t fit in, you die. At least that’s the way a small skinny kid two years ahead of his same age peers in school felt.

Actually it was my ethnic background that helped instead of hindered me. Like the rest of the kids I was a foreigner’s kid living in a new world, a world of Irish, Puerto Ricans, Italians, Polish, Negroes, Germans, etc. with all the slurry ethnic names we used for each other. Even though North Carolina shaped the reservoir of my fondest memories I later realized the probable reason my parents moved back to New York was because they were treated as ‘Yankee’ outsiders and foreigners. Even a couple of members of my own congregations down here over the years have chided my background with a mixture of perceived acceptance and a bit of ‘you’re still not one of us.’

I give you this bit of my history in order to make a point. Conformity is a survival necessity for every human being. That is, until they meet the Lord. This is why, after I became a believer in Jesus, I found the need to face who and whose I really am and how I have been shaped in order that I mature in Him. I built many strongholds to cover my fears along the way. They blocked me from being God’s image, the one Genesis tells me He created me to be. I think all of us spend our lifetime dealing with them.

Anyway in the process of becoming and being a disciple Paul’s witness has opened a lot up for me especially in the area of conformity and what the remedy is. For the first 11 chapters of Paul’s letter to Roman believers he has presented in detail the beauty and uniqueness of Jesus as the good news in contrast to the world’s bad news, a faith-bond of eternal life and love in Jesus as opposed to a sin-driven, self-centered and lonely fear-based existence apart from God (for me, my above thoughts).

So let’s look at Paul’s antidote to the world’s conditioning. In Ch.12 he introduces three principles to offset the world’s toxic pressures. First, don’t be conformed to the world. Second, be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Third, test and approve what God’s good, pleasing and perfect will is. Each of these involve the work of the Holy Spirit leading through Scripture. Following these basic principles come the specifics that we employ to witness to Jesus in our everyday life.

But let’s start with the conformity issue. JBPhilips’ translation, “Don’t let the world squeeze you into its mold” catches Paul’s idea completely. Think of all the times we have been ‘squeezed’ to adjust and fit into the social atmosphere around us in order to escape the internal and external pain we might experience. It could be the unwritten but real rules of a gang, the way we present ourselves because the church we go to has certain expectations, the boss and office ’apple polishing’, college fraternity behavior and… zounds…of all places, in the elderly milieu of a retirement community. Even when the moral standards of a group have biblically identifiable parallels, obedience to them is separated from the Holy Spirit. You can tell when they are fear driven as opposed to Spirit led. Things like not associating with bad people, being meek, putting up a good front, doing good for the sake of how you look and the effect on family reputation, keeping a check on your emotions. It’s important to build an acceptable ‘persona’ wherever you are. All of it, conformity to the world.

Actually we need to catalog the relational rules that have formed our responses to the world around us. Now I’m not talking about navel gazing here. This is just part of our confessional responsibility before God. How many of our repetitive responses to the world are based on the fear of what others might think? Our present culture with its fear of offense is a spiritual hazard keeping us from honest interchange. Clam up, smile and look accepting. Know what I mean? The more those fears are exposed before the Lord the more the Holy Spirit has to work with when it comes to maturing our witness in the world. Of course we will make mistakes in our efforts at personal honesty but how else can we learn? Our real teacher has His and our Father’s will working in our hearts 24/7. When Jesus said “The Kingdom is near” He was speaking of His presence. For Jesus ‘near’ is ‘here.’ As He has said “I am always with you always to the end of the age.”

Every next moment is a relational challenge and a personal challenge to undo past conformity and embrace a new conformity. How will we respond? There is one conformity Paul recognized for himself and for all believers. It is filled with God’s presence and promise, Romans 8:28-30, “28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who[a] have been called according to his purpose. 29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. 30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.”