During the fall of 2009, my wife Jennifer (my fiancée at the time) and I participated in a church small group focused around the biblical views of social justice — take that, Glenn Beck!– and as part of this group, one of our first “homework” assignments was to purchase the popular self-help book Strengths Finder 2.0 and complete the online assessment to determine our greatest personality themes/strengths, so that we could then report our findings to the group during our next meeting.
After completing the online assessment I received a personalized report of my top five strength “themes”. Secretly hoping for some really cool (i.e. manly) strengths, I was instead presented with what to me sounded like the wussy-est “strengths” list ever created (with my initial interpretation included):
- insert laughter at my expense here…
So… as encouraging as I found the above results ::pause for effect:: I began to seriously dread the moment when I would be sharing this amongst a mixed group of males and females and began to strategize a way to skip out on that next meeting. Unfortunately, my search for a legit absence produced zilch and I cursed my failed “strategery” as I sat in the circle of twenty-somethings in our friends’ living room with the above list on my lap.
As other members of the group began to read through their list of strengths, I started noticing an unfortunate trend. The guys’ lists seemed to be populated by words like “activator” (which sounds like a testosterone-laden combination of “action” and “aviator”–picture Tom Cruise in Top Gun) and “command” (as in “I command attention because I am so awesome”) while the girls’ lists began to sound uncomfortably similar to my own — except for my wife’s which…well, let’s put it this way: if my list and my wife’s list had been schoolmates, her list would’ve been giving my list swirlees and taking its lunch money on a daily basis. Suffice it to say, that meeting was quite the humbling experience.
Discouraged by my apparent lack of manliness, I decided it would be a good idea to seek encouragement (translation: I was hoping to find something that would tell me my list of strengths was more than a mere consolation prize offered by a sympathetic computer program). The internet seemed like an easy place to start, but as quickly as I googled the phrase “being a man” I was blasted with definitions like does not take ‘no’ for an answer, power-hungry, and self-confident (this last one stung a bit as the lack of confidence in myself was what had led me to those sites in the first place).
Finally, I came to the conclusion that I should just accept defeat, relinquish my “man-card” to the proper authorities, and curse God for making me such a crappy example of manhood.
Then I realized that I had been looking for my answers in all the wrong places.
Belief in God is one thing. Believing what the bible says about God can be much more difficult. If God is perfect and He makes no mistakes then that must mean He has created us each for a specific purpose… on purpose.
God hasn’t made us all such unique individuals just so he can laugh as we compare and contrast ourselves with the archetypes of the world. The world is screwed up and its archetypes are screwed up and no matter how much we berate ourselves (or each other) for not fitting its molds we will continue to strive for self-confidence and we will never be satisfied.
But, if we begin to change our point of reference and refuse to let the world define us, we can then begin to see our unique skills for what they really are: tools given to us by a perfect God so that we may fulfill our specific role in the building of His Kingdom. And being able to rest confidently in that is the key to true satisfaction.
(not so) easy listening 