I love shopping at Value Village. Value Village is a national thrift shop, or what would once have been called a second hand store. Buying gently used items is a great way to keep things out of land fills and to enjoy products that may well last longer than their user. One of the things that strikes me about the available stock is the number of oddball items that you can find.
Oddball items are those things that make you wonder what people were thinking when they either designed them or had them in their homes. They are those weirdly tacky knick-knacks, strangely coloured or styled clothes and bits of hardware or machinery that defy both physics and logical explanation. Of course, you don’t need to go to thrift store to find things like that. As an avid electronic hobbyist I can remember many products that hit the market with a great big thud because they were either too strange or too useless. Or as a child, there were those games and toys that were so bizarre you had to wonder if someone was having a really bad day when they thought of them.
Just as there are oddball objects that give one reason to check their eyes, there are folks who just don’t seem to fit in with the rest of us supposedly normal people. They’re the people that make us feel uncomfortable; the ones that test our patience; the individuals that push our buttons; the outcast that makes us smile even though others might frown at us for doing so. Oddballs are the ones on the edge of acceptability or the fringes of society. One way or another, oddballs just don’t seem to offer what we would define as normal, expected or acceptable behaviour.
God’s expectation of us is not to reject or shun the Oddball. For one thing, I’m sure God thinks we are all pretty weird given how hard we make life for ourselves, so it doesn’t make sense for us to point fingers. The other issue is that whether we’re strange, normal or somewhere in between, we are called to love our neighbour, no matter who or what they may be. We are not called to judge one another. Jesus does not state that we should judge God and our neighbour as ourselves. We are not taught that we are pass judgment unto others as we would have judgment passed onto us. No matter what a person might be like we are to care for them and treat them the best way we know how.
Someone once wrote: “Noah was a Drunk; Elijah was Suicidal; Peter was a Coward; Jacob was a Deceiver; Rahab was a Prostitute; Samson was a Womanizer; Moses had a Self-esteem problem; David was an Adulterer/Murderer; The Samaritan Woman was Divorced--a lot.” God not only loved these people, he used them to great effect even though they’re pretty odd.
So, let’s face the truth of the Oddball: chances are there is at least one person that thinks I’m rather strange. It’s most likely that you are an Oddball in the eyes of someone else. So, fine, none of us is perfect; yet we are all perfectly able to love one another. That’s all God asks of us and that’s more than enough to make a positively wonderful difference in the world.
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