Same Woman, Two Places

I went on a first date once, a few years ago, with a man who looked very good on paper.

He was a man of God. Emotionally mature, by every account. Available. Kind. Stable. I didn’t know much beyond that, and I don’t imagine he knew much more about me. We’d had maybe three phone conversations, the kind where you trade the bare essentials and get a sense of someone’s voice. But the essentials were good, and good essentials are worth a cup of coffee.

I came straight from work in the early afternoon, still in my scrubs, hair pulled back, hospital smells still clinging to me. He was already at a table. And from the moment I sat down, I could see on his face that this wasn’t going to be an evaluation for both of us. He’d already done his evaluating. This was a planning session.

He’d decided what we were going to be. He talked about how I would bring fulfillment to his otherwise dull life. How I’d lift him out of the low places he’d been stuck in for years. How I’d help him in all the areas he’d been longing for help. I barely knew his last name, and before we even ordered our coffee he was talking about me taking it.

There wasn’t a second date.

I hadn’t thought about him in a long time, until a few weeks ago, when I found myself comparing that afternoon to another relationship I’d been in. That man was a deep introvert. His ideal day was spent in his bedroom programming, or watching movies quietly to recharge, with as few people involved as possible. Almost any activity drained him, even going to the gym by himself. And I am, by every measure, an extrovert. I come alive around people, at tables, on dance floors, in rooms full of noise. Over time he told me, more than once, that I was exhausting. That being with me felt like being forced to perform.

This is what struck me: the vigor and enthusiasm one man saw as life itself, the cure for his dull days, another man found exhausting.

I hadn’t changed. I wasn’t performing for the first man or holding back for the second. I was the same woman, with the same personality and the same way of thinking.

Yet I looked completely different depending on whose eyes I was in.

I’ve noticed it in almost every kind of relationship I’ve had. Around some people, I flourish. I feel built up, seen, more fully myself. Around others, I feel somehow less, as though I’m too much and not enough at the same time. And for most of my life, when I’ve felt that “less than” feeling, I’ve assumed it meant I needed to grow. That the friction was evidence of some flaw I ought to fix.

Sometimes that’s been right. Sometimes I do rub people the wrong way for reasons I need to own. But I’m beginning to suspect I can only grow so far, and that some of what I’ve been trying to sand down isn’t a defect at all. It’s just who I am, landing differently on different people.

I realized Jesus asked His disciples what people were saying about Him.

“Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they told Him: “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets” (Matthew 16:13-14). Then He asked them who they said He was, and Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (16:16).

I’d always read that passage for Peter’s confession. But this time I noticed the list before it. The same man, walking the same roads, saying the same things, and people couldn’t agree who He was. John’s Gospel is even more blunt. “While some said, ‘He is a good man,’ others said, ‘No, he is leading the people astray'” (John 7:12). Later, after He spoke about being the Good Shepherd, some said, “He has a demon, and is insane,” while others said, “These are not the words of one who is oppressed by a demon” (John 10:20-21).

Jesus didn’t change between those crowds. He was the perfect, unchanging Son of God. And still, people looked at Him and saw wildly different things.

If the One who was entirely without flaw was perceived in a dozen contradictory ways, I don’t think I should be surprised that I am.

“For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life” (2 Corinthians 2:15-16).

Life to one person, death to another… He’s describing one scent received two completely different ways, depending on who’s breathing it in.

I want to be careful with this one, because Paul is talking about the gospel, not personality, and I’m not suggesting that anyone who finds me exhausting is perishing. That would be absurd, and unkind. The man who needed quiet wasn’t wrong to need it. But the principle underneath still holds. A single, unchanging thing can be life to one person and a burden to another, and that difference doesn’t always tell you something is wrong with the thing itself.

The first date reminded me of a crowd in John 6.

After Jesus fed the five thousand, the people were thrilled. They’d found someone who could give them bread, and they knew exactly what they wanted Him to be. “Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself” (John 6:15).

They didn’t want Jesus. They wanted what He could do for them, and they were ready to force Him into that role whether He agreed or not.

That’s what I felt across that coffee table. The man wasn’t interested in finding out who I was. He’d already decided what I would be for him: his fulfillment, his rescue, the answer to his loneliness. I was being fitted for a role I’d never auditioned for.

Jesus withdrew. So did I. So I don’t think either of us was being unkind.

And yet Jesus did something similar once, and it was beautiful.

The very first time Jesus met Simon, John says, “Jesus looked at him and said, ‘You are Simon the son of John. You shall be called Cephas'” (John 1:42). Cephas means rock. At their first meeting, before Simon had done anything, Jesus told him who he was going to be.

So what’s the difference between that and my coffee date?

• First: The word for “looked there” is emblepō, to look intently, to look into. Jesus didn’t name Simon from a distance or from a set of essentials over the phone. He saw him all the way down.

• Second: Jesus didn’t tell Simon what he’d do for Jesus. He told Simon who Simon would become. The name pointed to Peter’s own future, shaped by God, not to the needs Peter would fill in someone else’s life.

Isaiah speaks to a Jerusalem that had been called many things by the nations around her. “You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate, but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the LORD delights in you” (Isaiah 62:4). And just before that: “you shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD will give” (62:2).

Other people had named her. God named her differently, and His name was the one that stood.

Then there’s a strange and lovely promise in Revelation, to the church at Pergamum. “To the one who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it” (Revelation 2:17).

I find that verse more comforting every year. There’s a name God has for me that no one else can read. Not the man who wanted me to cure his loneliness, and not the man who found me exhausting. Not the friends who build me up or the ones who make me feel small. The truest description of who I am isn’t available to any of them. It’s between me and God.

In fact, I found this kind of interesting: Paul corrects himself in the middle of a sentence about this. He’s writing to the Galatians and says, “But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God” (Galatians 4:9). He starts to put it one way and then turns it around, as if he realized the second half mattered more.

Knowing God is precious. But being known by God is the foundation. Whatever I am in anyone else’s eyes is partial. What I am in His is complete.

So how much am I supposed to grow? I don’t want to use any of this as an excuse to never change. Some of the friction I cause is mine to own. There are times my energy runs over other people. Times I push when I should wait, or fill a silence that someone else needed to keep. I can grow in reading a room, in noticing when someone’s tank is empty, in loving people in the shape they actually need rather than the shape I find natural. Sanctification reaches into all of that, and I want it to.

But I’m not sure God is asking me to become an introvert. I don’t think my extroversion is a sin to be repented of, any more than that man’s need for quiet was a sin. Some differences are just differences. They make certain pairings hard, and theres no one to blame necessarily for that.

Paul puts a limit into one of his most demanding commands that I’ve started to lean on. “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Romans 12:18). If possible. So far as it depends on you. He knew there would be relationships where peace wasn’t fully possible, and where the outcome didn’t entirely depend on you. He didn’t frame that as a failure… he treated it as reality.

I think some of my “less than” feelings have come from trying to be peaceable with everyone by becoming whatever they needed, and discovering there wasn’t enough of me to go around. And I think some of my flourishing has come from people who simply liked the woman who walked in, scrubs and all.

I’m still the woman who walked into that coffee shop. Same energy, same habits. To one man I was a cure. To another I was a weight. To some of my friends I’m a breath of air, and to others, I suspect, I’m a bit much.

None of those is my name.

They’re descriptions of how I land on different people, and they tell me as much about the people as they do about me. I’ll keep listening to them, because some of them have things to teach me.

But I’m learning not to confuse them with the name on the white stone, the one only God and I will ever read.