A Misfit Pressed Against The World’s Frame
by Donavon L Riley
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Though I have lived as a misfit pressed against the world’s frame, I trust that my jagged edges are not a flaw but a gift, shaped by Christ for a purpose only His hands can fulfill.—D.
I have spent my life at the edges, pressed hard against the world’s frame—never quite fitting within its lines. As a child, I was marked as too restless, too wild, too strange. My questions were sharp where answers were dull, my imaginings vast where the rules demanded limits. And this difference followed me, a burr stuck fast in the wool: through youth, when loneliness stung like nettles; into adulthood, when anger at myself tangled with frustration at others; and even into ministry, where my calling often feels like exile.
I see now that the world and I may never align. It’s not just that I don’t fit; it’s that I was not shaped for its ease. Even among the faithful, even in the house of God, the voice bites like a rusted blade: Why can’t you be like the rest? But this ache, this splintering, may not be a curse—it may be the chiseling of a deeper shape. The stone that does not conform may yet have a place carved by Christ’s own hands.
Did He also not walk the margins? Was He not called unfit for the patterns of His time, an offense to both the righteous and the rich? The furrows that didn’t hold Him won’t hold us either. In His ministry, Christ did not smooth Himself into their molds; He shattered them and made new forms. Could it be, then, that the discomfort, the discord, is the holy tension of being set apart? That the weight you bear is, in truth, a gift—not to crush but to draw out the odd and jagged glory of your making?
The weight may never lift fully this side of heaven, but neither will the promise fail: you were shaped by the hand of the Craftsman for a purpose no one else can fill. The longing for peace with the world must give way to the hope of His peace, deeper than fitting in, fiercer than belonging. In Him, the outcast finds not a cage but a kingdom; the outlier becomes a witness. Christ does not call us to fit—He calls us to follow, until the splinters of this rough life become, in His hands, a new and dazzling whole.