Gradually I have been gathering snippets about the life of the girl whom I loved at school and who rejected me, back then, married someone else, and is now sadly dead. It is becoming clear that she was always meant to be the wife of a Christian worker, working among the poor and down-and-outs and bringing the gospel to people. And so she did.
What I have come to realise is that I would have been utterly wrong for her. The kind of life that I have lived — bookish, rather isolated – was not what she was made for. If by some fluke she had married me, she would have been miserable and frustrated, and her life’s work wasted.
She was a tender-hearted girl, I think. The over-powering love I (as a seventeen-year old boy) directed at her must have been hard to resist, yet she did, by the grace of God, and still managed to be gracious to me, in a careful, distant way. That love of mine, for her, was essentially a temptation. It is rather sobering to realise that you were an agent of harm, where the purest emotion of your life was concerned!
But this has lead me to ask: does God only use the ‘people’ people?
There are two sorts of people out there. There are those focused on other people, and there are the task- or thing-oriented people. I know that I am in the latter class, and indeed I only function among others by means of some carefully fabricated plastic personalities. Most of us, perhaps, do the same.
It’s like getting a lame dog over a stile. Some people will pick up the lame dog and lift it over the stile. Others will look at the stile and say, “We need to redesign this stile so that lame dogs can get themselves through it.”
Neither is wrong. Temperament comes into this a lot.
But … does God only want the first sort? It sometimes seems so. Certainly those who are NOT people oriented find only a marginal role in most Christian activity. They get set to do the magazine, or stuff like that (hey, I’ve been there!) Can we think of a thing-oriented person in the bible?
It’s worth praying about. God calls us to be like Him, to submit to Him, to be changed by Him into what he meant us to be.
So how does it work for those of us who are socially awkward, rather isolated? What does God want of us?
And, of course … how on earth do we ever get married, if the Christian girls all want to marry the other sort!