Part Two: The Hometown Voice
In Part One, I mentioned that a lot of us, are afraid of what the people around us will say. You make a move, and the reaction from some of the people closest to you is not what you expected. Not anger exactly, but not support either. It’s a kind of temperature drop. The group chat gets quiet. A compliment comes with a splinter in it. Somebody says, "Oh, so you think you're somebody now," and laughs, and you laugh too, and then you replay it for three days.
That feeling has a name in Scripture, and it is older than any of us. In Mark 6:4, Jesus goes back to his hometown. He teaches in the synagogue, and the people who hear him are astonished, and then the astonishment turns sour because regardless of what he just said, they still remember. They start to say, “Isn't this the carpenter? Don't we know his mother and his brothers? Who does he think he is?” Then Jesus verbalized an observation that I’m thankful for because it reminds me that even He had this issue. Jesus said, a prophet gets honor everywhere except in his own town, among his own relatives, and in his own house. Even though you and I read about the many miracles performed in other places, there, in his hometown, he couldn’t perform as many because their faith was so low.
This is what I have to remind myself that it tells me. The hometown crowd was not made up of villains. They were people who remembered. They had watched him grow up, and they had a picture of who he was, and the picture was frozen. When the real person walked back in, the boy who grew into a man, the carpenter, who grew into the healer, the picture they remembered, and the person in front of them did not match, and instead of updating the picture, they got offended at the person for growing of all things.
That is what happens in our own towns, our own families, our own churches. People hold a copy of you from fifteen years ago. They remember the version who did not know how to do any of this yet. And your growth, without you saying a word, makes them feel like they have to renegotiate what they believe about you, and what they believe about themselves. Some people will do that work to see the new you, but some will decide it is easier if you just go back to the way you were.
I want to be careful here, because I do not want anybody reading this thinking the whole town is plotting against them. Most people are not praying against you. A lot of them are just not praying for you, and I will admit that quiet can feel exactly the same. Some of the pushback comes from love, a worry that you will get hurt. Some of it comes from their own fear that they are projecting onto you. And yes, some of it comes from envy, because envy is real and it is older than every one of us. Part of wisdom is learning to tell these apart without turning bitter.
This is hard when you experience it and learn it, but it must be said. There are people who benefit from your smallness. They benefit from you being reliable, available, the one who does not ask for more, and makes their life easier. When you start to move, it costs them something. They do not always say that out loud, and many of them do not even know it themselves, but you can feel it in how they respond.
In response, sometimes we feel the need to explain what we see, feel or know. Joseph is the one I always go to. In Genesis 37:6, he has a dream, and he is so excited about it that he walks straight to his brothers and tells them all of it. The text says they hated him even more because of the dream and what he said. I do not read that as Joseph being wrong to dream. I read it as Joseph being early, and unfiltered, and handing the most fragile thing he owned to the people least equipped to hold it. The dream was true, but the audience was not ready.
Not everyone who loves you has the capacity to hear it early. You can tell people the dream without telling them the details. In my world, nobody shows their whole hand before the deal is signed, and that is not deceit. It is protecting something that is not finished yet. Some things need a season of quiet before they are ready to be announced. Who has earned a seat at your planning table? Not just to be able to hear your dream, but to also speak life into it.
Proverbs says the tongue has the power of life and death. We usually read that about what we say over other people, but I think it is just as true about what we say in front of the wrong people. Some words get planted in soil that is not going to let them grow. And I will tell you that the first voice speaking against most of us is our own. How many times have you said, "I can’t do that," or "That is not for me," before anyone else had a chance to weigh in? We have been speaking against our own plans for years, and we have not noticed because we say it so casually. We think we’re being realistic, or worse, we think we’re making the choice rather than saying it out of fear.
There is also another side of this, which is what your move does to the people watching. When you step out, you give some people permission. A younger cousin sees it. A coworker sees it, a woman who has been sitting on her own suitcase sees it and starts to wonder. At the same time, your move holds up a mirror to the people who have been standing still, and not everybody enjoys the reflection. You cannot control which reaction you get, and you are not responsible for managing it. But it helps to know that the silence, the side comments, and the strange energy are often about the mirror and have very little to do with you.
I keep coming back to the line from Mark, that Jesus could do very little in his hometown because of their unbelief. Notice that he did not stay there arguing with them. He went to the next village and kept teaching. Your assignment might not require the approval of the place that raised you. It might require you to love them from a distance and keep going.
Who have you been shrinking your story for, and what would it cost you if you don’t stop?