Excuse me sir, but your desperate need for acceptance is showing.

I had a pretty fun day yesterday. My kids are up in Alaska visiting my former wife’s parents, so I have the freedom to hang out and do nothing for a week. My church has a service on Saturday evening and Sunday morning, so I went to both. It was great. Curt, (the pastor) asked us to think about the aspect of our life where we didn’t feel Christ was meeting our needs fully. Such as finances, relationships, etc. We grabbed another person and prayed through that issue with them. Mine was romance. Like I stated earlier, I just have this gnawing desire to give it, but no appropriate outlet for it. Then the sermon was about loving God. He actually used the word ‘romance’ right at the beginning. Which was interesting, since he hadn’t the night before. I still don’t know how to ‘romance’ God. There are a few obvious differences between Him and a woman. Let me just calculate here…. Hmm, yeah, approximately 12 quabillion differences. So I don’t know how analogous I can get with that. But I do know that God has met my needs in every other area of my life, so I’m pretty confident He won’t let me down in this one.

Speaking of letting me down, let me tell you what a desperate fool I am. But not in a self deprecating sort of way. I was hanging out at this house where a bunch of girls from church live. We watched Big Fish, which was really cool. Afterward people were just hanging out being board and silly. This is always dangerous territory for me, as I have a tendency to let myself go when others are relaxed like that. This social retardation takes the form of dry, sarcastic humor that most people don’t think is funny. Especially when they can’t tell that I’m joking. Well there was this one girl who seems very similar to me in that respect. She ‘got’ it. Then there was another one, I’ll call her Princess. (Which makes sense, because her name is Princess.) I totally thought she was ‘getting’ it. But I guess not. She got really annoyed with me and let me know it. The conversation went something like this:

Princess: “I hate it when people act all sarcastic all the time. I know this one guy who is always lying about everything.”

Me: “Well, I was just joking. I don’t lie about important things.”

Princess: “You can never know when to take him seriously.”

Me: “I can be serious… I mean, I know I’m a bit pathetic when I….”

Princess: “Grrr! I hate it when guys aren’t self-confident!”

Me: “I was just joking about being pathetic.”

Princess: “Now you’re lying again!”

Me: (Crap, she’s right!) “I think I’ll go stand outside now.” *Goes and stands outside*

So she kept putting the hoops up, and I kept jumping through them. Don’t get me wrong. She is a cool girl and seems like she could be a lot of fun. We just didn’t ‘click’, which I feel bad about, since the main reason was me being too sarcastic.

But this conversation makes me ponder a something. Why did I keep jumping through all the hoops? The only reason that comes to mind is that I just wanted to be accepted by her. Not necessarily her as an individual, but by proxy, everyone. I tend to view myself as a non-conformist type who doesn’t care what others think. Obviously, the verbal gymnastics I went through prove that this is a delusion.