So, I used to be a loser, and then I developed a pride issue, but then I worked on getting rid of it, which has led to an occasional lack of pride issue.
Let us begin at the beginning. When I was a kid I used to be bullied, my bullying doesn't seem as bad as today's does, but it still sucked. I was called four-eyes because of my glasses. I was called dork and nerd because of my brain. People would call me a wimp because of my lanky frame. Occasionally some people would hit me and a handful of times I got beat up because I could be. From the time I started 5th grade at Washington Lands Elementary School through my junior year of high school at John Marshall there were plenty of times when I wouldn't walk certain streets in my hometown because of kids that lived there, there were days I would miss my bus just so I would get a ride to school, once in High School I walked the five miles or so home so I wouldn't be bothered on the bus.
[Like many kids who have been or are been bullied I lived my sentence in silence, so Mom, if you are reading this I am sorry that I never told you about most of these things, I thought it was best at the time.]
Needless to say that I greatly looked forward to graduation and getting out of that town and hoping to never go back. [To this day whenever I go back there I get a pain in my stomach about 2 hours out] Like many people I saw college as a chance to start over, to let go of the past and create a new me, so that is exactly what I did. I created this persona of someone who had it all together, who could speak into any situation, who always had an answer or a joke or a solution. And by and large it worked, I won't say that I was the upper-crust of the college hierarchy, but I was definitely no where near the bottom either. I had friends of all groups and social statuses. I was who I wanted to be for the first time in my life, and I was doing just fine.
The one negative aspect that did bubble to the top though was that I began to overcompensate on my self-esteem, I no longer thought of myself in those negative ways that I used and instead began to think of myself in uber-positive ways. I now thought of myself as better than most people, smarter than most people, more capable than most people. I began to become an internal snob, and all too often it would flow over into being an external snob. Now I found myself being the one who occasionally bullied people, not with my fists but with my words. I could tear people down with the best of them, too often [once would have been too often] bringing people to tears.
So, I had gone from being the kid that walked out of my way to not get beat up to being the guy that would go out of my way to beat someone up. Needless to say I began to become as disappointed with my current situation as my past one. And so, as my faith began to grow and change I decided that my attitude and actions had to begin to do the same thing.
For over a decade now I have been on this journey of becoming a genuine nice guy as opposed to the false one that I claimed to be. By and large I feel that I have done a good job, I'm not prefect or even nice all the time, to be honest occasionally the dragon of pride will rear his head and strike out, but it is fewer and farther between. The biggest negative is that sometimes I let my pride go too much and go from the point of over prideful to overly low self-esteem. The goal, of course, is to find a happy medium, where I do not consider people either lower or higher than myself, but to get to the point where I consider us all equal.
I can talk that game of equality well, but living it 100% and believing it 100% still takes time. I want neither to be the bullied nor the bully. I want to believe that I am good enough at things, not the greatest and not the least. I do not want to live a life where I put people down, thinking that people are losers or somehow beneath me; but I also do not want to live a life where I put myself down, thinking that I am a crappy pastor and a crappy friend and a crappy husband and a crappy father and so forth and so on.
I write this so that you would know me a little better, so that when I am a jerk you might be able to forgive me and when I am down you might be able to lift me up, and I hope that I could do the same for you.
Peace and Love,
Pastor K
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