Sticks and Stones

As I strolled down Locust Walk toward my afternoon class, I came across a woman handing out pamphlets. I was immediately skeptical as to what she was distributing. She was too young to be dispersing fliers for a campus party, so I knew her intention was something religiously or politically affiliated. I took my time and followed my usual stranger evasion measures: I avoided eye contact by looking down and pretending to fiddle with my cell phone, and I picked up my pace and kept to the opposite side of the walk to ensure that our paths could in no way cross.

I succeeded in saving myself the trouble of being “bothered” by some crazy lady and her misguided beliefs, but my ivy league mind forced me to consider what had just occurred. She was part of that mysterious group, Jews for Jesus. Before, I had assumed that they were simply another weird cult hoping to build a large base of followers and make a profit. However, as I had just said, my knowledge of them was based merely on assumptions. To correct this problem, I thought it worthwhile to do some research on this unfamiliar denomination. In their own words, the Jews for Jesus describe themselves in this way:

Our mission statement is to make the Messiahship of Jesus an unavoidable issue to our Jewish people worldwide. (Naturally in speaking to our Jewish people, lots of other people are listening in.) We call that evangelism, which is an active way to tell others the good news about God’s desire to reconcile people to himself through the Jewish Messiah Jesus. We do evangelism through the things we write, the conversations we have, the music we play and the drama we enact. Pretty much all our programs are about evangelism because that is the whole reason Jews for Jesus exists. But when you look to the right, you’ll see different aspects of what we do . . . from our street evangelism, to various kinds of youth outreach/mentoring (we do not evangelize people under the age of 18 without their parents’ permission) to programs we offer in churches. (Our church programs are designed to speak to believers and unbelievers alike.)

All of this information leads to my hopefully compelling point: what makes my initial thoughts about this woman logical? In other words, what defines something or someone as weird? I call Jews for Jesus strange because it is different from my own faith, from what I was brought up to believe. However, this fact shouldn’t make those people any more bizarre than the computer I’m typing on right now. I see something foreign, such as an orthodox Jew or a Hare Krishna, and I unconsciously define it as peculiar based on my own personal biases (I know that I am not alone in this either). Moreover, extending this idea beyond religion, how can anyone possibly label anything as being peculiar? Many would consider Joe Coleman, for example, to be a twisted and abnormal man because he acts and thinks differently than many others, and “Goths” and nerds would be looked at sideways because of their deviation from familiarity. Yet those people considered “normal” have no real substantiation other than their own partiality. We see others as strange because they are not like us, but those “others” most likely see us in the same way, as “those weirdoes.” Unless some ultimate power can settle this for us, there is no supreme ordinariness against which to say that one thing is or is not normal. The next time you come across something or someone new, think before you judge; maybe you’re the unusual one.