Becoming Someone Else’s Handiwork

I met her at a board game night. It was one of the rare occasions that year I left the house for anything social.

She was, objectively, one of the coolest people I have ever shared a room with. Married almost a decade to a man who clearly adored her. Covered in tattoos that were funny rather than decorative.. like, she had “Fe” inked over each knee. Iron knees. Irony. Her hair was three colors that seemed to fit her, despite them clashing And she was the best game master I have ever played under on top of it all.

Her friends were similar: People who joined oddball clubs on purpose. People who threw PowerPoint parties, where everyone builds a slide deck about something they are irrationally passionate about and presents it to a small audience. I had never encountered that kind of life.

I did not know people constructed their weeks out of things like that.

At the time I was a stay-at-home sort of person. I played in the occasional world of warcraft raid, but I had no hobbies to speak of past that, and the board game night was an aberration in an otherwise stale calendar.

So as I sat across from her, I found myself thinking with no hesitation at all: I want to be like that.

I looked for every excuse to be around her, and the excuses did not multiply the way I expected. We got along. There was nothing awkward between us. But the invitations stayed narrow, and I could not work out why. Her friend group had a door and I was standing outside it without ever having been told there was a door.

I was the only Christian in the orbit, though I was not making a big fuss of it. I have never been the sort to open with my faith. So I filed the distance under something I could not name and kept showing up when I was asked.

Then she invited me on her annual girls’ trip, and I was thrilled past ALL proportion. The trip was absolutely wonderful and nourishing for everyone.

It was right after that I learned she was part of a poly community and had an open marriage. And that the men she was interested in were interested in me instead.

That was the end of it.

It wasnt announced or discussed, but I saw the writing on the wall the invitations stopped entirely, and I understood I had become a problem by receiving attention she had wanted. I was not doing anything with the attention. I did not want it. I racked my brain trying to figure out how to give it to her… but failed to come up with tangible solutions.

That one hurt for a long time.

But as I look back at that time, years later, I see I took her with me anyway.

Not the poly community, not the group, but the parts I had admired from the very first night. The quirkiness. The willingness to be strange in public. The hobbies pursued for no reason other than they were interesting. Over the following years I built those into my own life piece by piece, slowly, until they stopped being borrowed and started being mine.

And they are mine now. When people describe me these days, they use her adjectives. Quirky. Fun. The one who runs the games and plans the odd events. I look in the mirror and I see it, and I have actual difficulty reconstructing the woman who sat at that board game table with nothing to say about how she spent her time.

So the person who eventually discarded me is also the person I am partly made of. I would not be who I am if I had not met her.

I have been going back and forth on whether this is a kind of theft, and I have decided it is not, though the reasoning took me a while.

Paul writes to the Corinthians, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). The word is mimētai — the root of mimic, imitator, the one who copies. He says it again in Philippians: “join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us” (3:17). And to the Thessalonians he notes that they became imitators of him and of the Lord, and then, in the next breath, that they became an example to everyone in Macedonia and Achaia (1 Thessalonians 1:6-7). The imitation propagates. Someone copies you and then becomes worth copying.

The assumption under all this, though, is that formation happens by watching, and not primarily by instruction.

Hebrews puts it more plainly than anywhere else: “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith” (13:7). Consider the outcome. Look at what the life produced, and if it produced something good, copy the method.

I did that. I looked at a life that had produced something I wanted and I copied the method. That she later behaved badly does not retroactively poison what I learned from her, any more than a teacher’s later failure “unlearns you the algebra” per se.

Paul seems careful about this part though: His instruction is never imitate me full stop. It is imitate me as I imitate Christ. There is a qualifier attached.

Which means the discernment sits with the imitator, and it has to be exercised piece by piece rather than as a whole. I could not adopt her whole life. Substantial portions of it were simply incompatible with what I believe, and I found that out after the fact rather than before. But her carelessness about strangeness, her refusal to be boring, her insistence that a life should contain things pursued purely because they delight you…. that was separable from the rest.

I think this is more or less what Paul is telling the Thessalonians when he says to test everything and hold fast what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). The verb is dokimazete, the assaying word, the one used for testing metal to find out what is actually in it. You are not required to swallow a person whole or reject them whole.

I have written before about the strange business of being visible without trying: of receiving attention I never asked for and cannot switch off.

This was one of the first times it cost me something significant, and it cost me the friendship I most wanted at the time.

James clarifies: “For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice” (3:16). The Greek behind jealousy is zēlos, which is neutral on its own and can mean zeal or ardor. It goes bad when it fixes on what someone else has. And what she wanted was not something I had taken.

What I have concluded is that people can be genuine instruments of good in your life and also be the ones who wound you, and the sequence does not cancel the earlier gift.

“you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20). Both verbs are chashab, the same word: to devise, to intend… two intentions running through one set of events. God’s intention was not a repair performed afterward. It was running the whole time, alongside theirs.

I am not calling what she did evil. It was small and human and she was probably barely aware of doing it. But the structure holds: the friendship ended for reasons that had nothing to do with my good, and the friendship formed me anyway, and that didn’t change when the friendship ended.

I still have the unusual hobbies and I still say yes to strange invitations that the woman at that board game table would have declined. And every one of those is downstream of four or five months of proximity to somebody who did not, in the end, want me around.

I would not choose that trade. But I notice I do not want to give the results back, either.