“I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” – Psalm 139:14
Have you ever wished you could be like someone else, or be someone other than yourself? I remember back in high school I became good friends with a guy who could play the piano. I mean he could play! Oh, how I wanted to be like him. Well, as a matter of fact my parents had paid for me to have piano lessons for many years when I was younger, so I knew something about music and the keyboard on a piano, so I decided that if I worked at it really hard I might learn to play like my friend. And I did learn a few songs alright, but I would never be able to match my friend’s ability to play and entertain because he had an innate talent I simply did not have. He was he, and I was me.
The 1961 movie The Great Imposter starring the late actor Tony Curtis is an intriguing story loosely based on a real-life character named Ferdinand Waldo Demara. Part drama, part comedy, the story follows Demara through a series of episodes where he literally fakes his way into being someone besides himself – lying his way into the U.S. Marines, then a Trappist Monk, later an aide to a prison warden (after serving time himself), and most amazing of all, pretending to be a surgeon serving on a Navy vessel where he successfully performed multiple medical procedures that actually saved lives. The plot of the whole story was how well Demara (Tony Curtis) was able to pretend at these various professions, until of course, it all caught up with him, as it so often does.
The piano phase was only one of many times I could be accused of trying to emulate others. The same pattern has occurred in pursuing various athletic endeavors in which no matter how hard I worked I was either not big enough or tall enough or fast enough or agile enough. The same for hobbies and past times I have tried, not to mention career pursuits. But over the years I have noticed that for me success seems to come when I am most uniquely me, rarely when emulating someone else. As Buckminster Fuller once pointed out, “No one ever made a difference by being like everyone else.”
If only we would pray and take to heart the words from that beautiful Psalm: “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” For peace and joy and contentment lie in knowing that full well.