The Black Sheep

Have you ever felt like a square peg in a round hole? The odd one in the family? The outcast in the room? The person swimming upstream while everybody else seems perfectly comfortable floating the other direction?

Have you ever felt like the black sheep?

If so, you are in good company.

People sometimes say that every family, group, workplace, or gathering has at least one black sheep—and if you cannot figure out who it is, there is a decent chance it is you.

Looking back over my life, I probably should have figured it out sooner.

Deep down, I knew I was different. I just did not yet have language for what that meant, so I became very good at hiding it.

I became a chameleon.

A chameleon survives by changing colors to match its surroundings. It studies the room, finds out what belongs there, and adjusts. That can be a remarkable ability. It can help you connect with almost anybody. It can teach you to understand people who grew up differently, believe differently, work differently, and see the world differently. But if you are not careful, adaptation can slowly become disappearance. You can become so skilled at reading every room that you stop asking who God created to walk into it.

I spent years changing colors to belong. God was teaching me how to stand out without standing alone.

The flock may call you different. The Shepherd calls you His.

When Fitting In Feels Like Survival

I remember changing schools in the middle of the year when I was in elementary school.

At that age, fitting in did not feel like a shallow popularity contest. It felt like survival. I remember forming what seemed like a very intelligent plan in my young mind: find the kids everyone else likes, figure out what they do, and do what they do. If the accepted kids accepted me, then everybody else probably would too.

It sounds funny now, but it worked well enough that I kept using the strategy.

From second grade through at least the first half of college, I tried to become Switzerland. I maintained friendships across almost every kind of social circle I could find: athletes, pop-punk kids, ranchers, drug users, drinkers, funny kids, band members, and just about everybody in between. Coming from a small town some kids fit into all the groups lol.

I learned the language of each group. I could find common ground, shift the conversation, and usually make myself comfortable around people who might not have had much in common with one another.

Some of that became a real gift. Relationships with very different people expanded how I saw the world. They taught me not to fear somebody simply because his background, vocabulary, work, or mistakes were different from mine. God would later redeem that social flexibility and use it in business, ministry, leadership, and almost every assignment that required me to walk into unfamiliar rooms.

But there was also a cost. When belonging depends on matching the room, acceptance becomes a performance. You stop asking whether the room is healthy, whether the people are headed in the right direction, or whether becoming like them is costing you something essential. The question becomes simpler and more dangerous: What version of me will be accepted here?

That question can make a person popular while leaving him unknown.

It can surround him with people while making him profoundly lonely.

It can make him welcome in every room except his own life.

The Armor I Built

After decades of getting hurt, misunderstood, pushed away, criticized, and sometimes persecuted, I developed thicker skin. I built a rocky wall around my heart and learned how to say, “I do not care what anybody thinks.”

That sentence can be incredibly liberating.

It can break the grip of approval and help a person take a step everybody else is too afraid to take. It can keep criticism from becoming a leash. It can help you survive rooms that preferred the chameleon and rejected the real person who finally showed up.

But used poorly, it can become poison.

“I do not care what anybody thinks” can turn discernment into defensiveness.

It can reject wise counsel with the same speed it rejects manipulation.

It can make every correction feel like persecution and every disagreement feel like proof that you are uniquely called. It can protect a wound so aggressively that nobody—not even the people God sent to help—can reach it.

The mature version is not, “I do not care what anybody thinks.”

It is:

“I care more about what God thinks.”

That statement leaves room for humility. It lets me listen without surrendering my assignment. It allows trustworthy people to tell me when I am wrong while refusing to let the crowd decide who I am. It keeps my heart soft without making my convictions negotiable.

A wall can stop arrows, but it can also stop love. Which I know all to well.

God did not free me from the need for approval so I could become unreachable. He freed me so approval would no longer have veto power over obedience.

The Gift Inside the Chameleon

When I met and married Danielle and moved to Chicago, I knew exactly one person. It was her.

After taking about a year off for what was basically a honeymoon phase, it was time to get back to business. I started going on four to eight meetings a day. Within a few years, I had built relationships with many of the key people in commerce throughout the city. There is a much bigger story there for another Field Note, but the point is that the same skill I developed while trying to survive new rooms became useful when God placed me in an unfamiliar city.

This is one of the things I love about redemption: God does not waste the survival skills we developed before we understood Him. He can separate the gift from the fear that formed around it. He can keep the ability to connect while healing the need to perform. He can preserve the empathy while removing the insecurity. He can let the chameleon’s awareness mature into the black sheep’s courage.

The answer was never to lose the ability to speak to different people. The answer was to stop changing my identity every time the audience changed.

Jesus could sit with tax collectors, sinners, religious leaders, fishermen, soldiers, wealthy people, sick people, rejected people, and crowds—but He never needed any of them to tell Him who He was. He entered their world without surrendering His identity to it.

That is the difference between connection and conformity.

Connection says, “I can meet you where you are.”

Conformity says, “I must become whatever you want so you will let me stay.”

Romans 12:2 warns us not to conform to the pattern of this world but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. God was not calling me to become socially incapable or suspicious of everyone who was different from me. He was calling me to stop allowing every room to become a mold.

The Calculus Classroom

The light-bulb moment happened in Calculus, of all places.

At the time, I was pursuing an engineering degree. It sounded impressive. It sounded responsible. It looked like a clear path other people could understand and respect. There was only one problem: it was not who I was called to be.

I am capable of math. I just stopped enjoying it when the numbers became imaginary. If we are going to make up numbers, I have other places I would rather use my imagination.

Sitting in that classroom, I realized I was building my life around somebody else’s standard of what my life should look like. I was trying to fit into another round hole. Keep in mind, this was before I was saved and understood how to describe a calling. I had also closed down the bar the night before, so “sober clarity” may not be the most accurate phrase. But God was still there, and He had already been working overtime on me.

I had experienced early success in business during college. Another story for another time... but I initially became successful on the pursuit of more beer money for the weekend.

Anyways, I came alive when I was building relationships, seeing opportunities, creating something, taking risks, and moving people toward a vision. The engineering path was not bad. It simply was not mine.

So, in the middle of class, I stood up and walked out.

Awkward.

I went directly to my advisor’s office and asked to transfer into the school of business.

That one decision changed the trajectory of my life. It did not solve every problem or prove that every instinct I had was correct. It did something more foundational: it marked the moment I stopped treating the crowd’s definition of a good life as the final authority over mine.

I could probably have figured out the math, finished the degree, and become an engineer. I could have returned to ranching. I could have gone into the electrical trade, the oilfields, the uranium fields, or continued toward any number of respectable paths that people I knew chose. Many friends are still doing good work in those fields and living in the same region. There was nothing wrong with their choices.

That life simply was not mine.

I felt called to more—not “more” in the sense that their lives were smaller or their work mattered less.

More meant more of what had been entrusted specifically to me.

More risk.

More movement.

More building.

More travel.

More unfamiliar rooms.

More responsibility for the abilities God had placed in me.

I was not better than the people around me. I was responsible for a different assignment.

There is a major difference between believing you are superior and recognizing you are set apart.

Superiority asks, “Why are these people not like me?”

Calling asks, “Why did God make me this way, and what am I responsible to do with it?”

One Decision After Another

Walking out of Calculus was not the last black-sheep decision. It became just one in a long sequence.

I chose to go heavily into athletics when most of my family and friends did not. I consistently chose risk and occasionally got a little crazy when most people preferred predictable ground. I went to college for a four-year degree and eventually earned multiple degrees at a time when only a small percentage of the people closest to me had completed even a two-year program. I chose business over the natural-resource positions, engineering, ranching, and cowboying paths that made sense where I came from. I moved across the country. I traveled the world and pursued experiences at almost any cost while many people I knew never applied for a passport.

None of those choices automatically made me faithful.

Risk can be reckless.

Education can become pride.

Travel can become escape.

Business can become an idol.

Moving away can be courageous, or it can be another form of running.

The spiritual value of a different decision is not that it is different. Its value comes from whether it is aligned with the assignment.

But taken together, those choices reveal something God was teaching me long before I knew how to say His name: conformity would never produce the life I was built to live.

After I married Danielle, “I chose” slowly became “we chose”—for the most part.

I often joke that I wanted to do one thing, Danielle wanted to do another, so we compromised and did what she wanted. Marriage is beautiful like that.

Come to find out, Danielle has plenty of black-sheep tendencies and history of her own. That matters because being set apart is difficult enough when you are alone. Covenant gives you somebody who can see the assignment without requiring it to look normal. It gives you a second voice when the crowd gets loud, a witness when the decision costs something, and a person who can tell the difference between your calling and your stubbornness.

Sometimes the Shepherd does not remove the black sheep’s difference. He places another set-apart person beside him and gives them an assignment neither would have completed alone.

Why the Wool Was Rejected

The phrase “black sheep” came from something literal. In a flock of white sheep, a sheep with black fleece was immediately visible. Historically, its wool was often treated as less valuable because it could not be easily dyed into other colors. White wool gave the owner options. Black wool arrived with a color already present.

That history created the insult. The black sheep became the odd, disreputable, embarrassing, or unwanted member of the family—the one whose difference supposedly lowered the value of the whole flock.

But the very trait that once made the wool less marketable gives us a powerful picture today:

Black wool is difficult to dye.

Some of us have spent our lives being told that the inability to take on everybody else’s colors was a defect. We were too intense, too curious, too ambitious, too restless, too outspoken, too willing to question, too unwilling to accept “this is how we have always done it.” We stood out when the system rewarded blending in.

Sometimes that difference was immaturity. Sometimes our intensity needed discipline, our ambition needed surrender, our questions needed wisdom, and our independence needed community. But sometimes the problem was not that we were wrong. The problem was that the room had no category for what God placed in us.

The flock saw wool it could not dye.

God saw a person who could eventually become difficult for the world to conform.

Being a black sheep does not mean refusing all influence. It means becoming increasingly resistant to any influence that requires disobedience. It means family expectations, cultural assumptions, political tribes, business traditions, church habits, and the opinions of strangers cannot automatically decide your color.

You were not created to be dyed by every environment you enter.

You were created to be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Lost Sheep and Black Sheep

The black-sheep idea naturally brings us to Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep in Luke 15 and Matthew 18. A shepherd has one hundred sheep. One wanders away. The shepherd goes after the missing one, finds it, carries it back, and rejoices because the one that was lost has come home.

But we should be careful not to force the metaphors together.

Jesus did not say the missing sheep was black, unusually creative, unfairly rejected, or spiritually superior to the ninety-nine. It was lost. The Shepherd did not leave the ninety-nine because the one had a more interesting personality. He went because it belonged to Him and He did not want it destroyed.

That distinction matters because people who identify as the black sheep can begin to romanticize wandering. Rejection can become identity. Isolation can become proof of uniqueness. We can tell ourselves the flock never understood us while ignoring the possibility that we actually left the safety of the Shepherd.

The Shepherd carried the lost sheep home. He did not congratulate it for wandering.

There have been times when I was misunderstood, and there have been times when I was simply wrong. There have been rooms that wanted me to conform, and there have been people trying to correct something dangerous in me. Wisdom requires enough humility to tell the difference.

Not every disagreement is persecution. Not every consequence is spiritual warfare. Not every closed door proves the crowd feared your calling. Sometimes God uses the flock to protect you from yourself. Sometimes the Shepherd’s voice sounds like correction from somebody who loves you enough to risk being disliked.

The beauty of the parable is not that being lost makes the sheep special. The beauty is that being lost does not make the sheep worthless.

God did not search for me so I could build my identity around being lost. He found me so I could belong to Him.

The world may call me a black sheep because I do not fit its pattern. My family may struggle to understand some of my decisions. Friends may choose safer roads. Old rooms may become uncomfortable when I stop changing colors. But my deepest identity is not outcast, entrepreneur, risk-taker, disruptor, wanderer, or even black sheep.

I belong to the Good Shepherd.

Jesus says in John 10 that He knows His sheep and His sheep know Him. That is the foundation. I do not need to be accepted by every flock because I am already known by the Shepherd. I do not need to manufacture difference for attention because He sees me in secret. I do not need to turn rejection into a throne because His shoulders already carried me home.

Set Apart Is Not the Same as Better

Later in life, the phrase “set apart” entered my vocabulary and changed how I understood being different.

Before Christ, difference often meant independence: Nobody gets to tell me what to do. After surrender, being set apart means something far more demanding: God gets to tell me what to do, even when nobody else understands.

That is not rebellion. It is obedience.

Rebellion resists authority because it wants its own will. Being set apart resists conformity because it has surrendered to God’s will. Rebellion says, “I will do whatever I want.” Calling says, “I will do what God asks, even when it costs me what I want.”

That is why 1 Peter’s language about being a chosen people and a holy nation cannot become a personal branding exercise. “Chosen” does not mean more valuable than the people around us. It means selected for belonging, service, and proclamation. “Holy” means set apart for God, not elevated for applause.

You do not become set apart by announcing how different you are.

You become set apart by obeying when conformity would be easier.

Sometimes obedience will make you stand out. Sometimes it will make you quietly serve in a place where nobody notices you. Sometimes it will require a public risk, and sometimes it will require the humility to stay. Sometimes you will walk out of the classroom. Sometimes God will tell you to sit back down and finish what you started.

The question is not, “Which choice makes me look more like a black sheep?”

The question is, “What has God made clear?”

Solitude Is Not Isolation

Being the black sheep can feel lonely. When your values change, some old relationships no longer fit the same way. When you break a generational pattern, the people who benefited from that pattern may not celebrate. When you stop playing the role assigned to you, a family system can treat your healing as betrayal. When you follow a calling nobody else can see yet, there may be long stretches when agreement is scarce.

That loneliness creates a dangerous temptation: turning being set apart into being cut off.

Isolation disconnects, distorts, and hides. It takes the wound of rejection and builds an identity around never needing anybody again. It turns the thick skin into armor, the armor into a wall, and the wall into a prison. Inside isolation, every unanswered message becomes more proof, every criticism becomes an attack, and every strained relationship reinforces the story that nobody will ever understand.

Solitude is different. Solitude brings God into the silence. It lets the noise of the flock quiet down long enough for the Shepherd’s voice to become clear. Solitude receives truth, exposes motive, and prepares a person to return to relationship and assignment.

The difference between isolation and solitude is not whether you are alone. It is who you bring into the silence.

The goal is not to become admired for standing alone. The goal is to remain obedient when nobody stands with you—and still remain humble enough to receive the people God sends.

Set apart from the crowd does not mean separated from the Shepherd.

And it does not mean separated forever from every flock.

Finding the Dangerous Few

There is a point when the old insult begins to lose its power. You meet other people who spent years believing their intensity was a defect. You recognize the builder who could not stop seeing what could be improved, the leader who could not pretend dysfunction was normal, the person breaking a generational cycle, the man learning obedience after years of rebellion, and the woman willing to choose conviction over comfort.

The black sheep discovers he is not the only one.

That is part of the heart behind The Dangerous Few. It should never become a complaint circle for angry outcasts, a place to rehearse rejection, or a club built around believing we are better than everybody else. It should be a training ground for people whose obedience has made easy belonging impossible—people who are ready to turn difference into service, wounds into wisdom, solitude into preparation, and calling into action.

A gathering of black sheep can still become another conformity machine if everybody is required to look, speak, vote, build, worship, risk, or lead exactly the same way. The goal is not to trade one white flock for a darker uniform. The goal is to gather around the same Shepherd while remaining faithful to the different assignments He gives.

The Dangerous Few are not dangerous because they are angry, loud, reckless, or impossible to lead. They are dangerous to darkness because fear no longer gets to make their decisions. They have stopped hiding. They are learning to obey. They can stand apart without becoming proud, connect without conforming, listen without surrendering conviction, and move before approval arrives.

Their difference is not a costume.

Their surrender is the source of their courage.

The Strategic Advantage of Standing Apart

Outside of faith, people often celebrate the black sheep for authenticity, creativity, innovation, resilience, and immunity to groupthink. There is truth in that. A person who is not trapped by consensus can see opportunities the crowd overlooks. He can question assumptions everybody else treats as law. He can build what does not yet exist because he is less interested in proving he belongs to the current system.

That ability has shaped my business life. The same instinct that made traditional paths feel limiting helped me enter new markets, meet people across industries, travel, take risks, imagine systems, and build things other people did not yet see. Being willing to look foolish is often part of attempting something original.

But innovation without surrender can become ego with a business plan. Authenticity without transformation can become an excuse to protect every flaw. Independence without community can create blind spots large enough to destroy everything you are building. Resilience without tenderness can make you impressive and impossible to love.

God does not merely want the black sheep to become successful at being different. He wants the whole person.

He wants the creativity and the insecurity beneath it. The courage and the wound that sometimes drives it. The ambition and the fear of being insignificant. The willingness to stand alone and the part that secretly hopes everybody will eventually admit you were right.

When those things are surrendered, difference becomes stewardship. Your unusual history becomes a way to reach people others cannot reach. Your broad relationships become bridges instead of camouflage. Your willingness to question becomes discernment instead of reflexive rebellion. Your appetite for risk becomes obedience rather than self-destruction.

The strategic advantage is not simply that you think differently.

It is that you have become free enough to think clearly, humble enough to be corrected, and surrendered enough to act when God speaks.

Stop Changing Colors

You were born unique, with a specific combination of God-given abilities, experiences, burdens, relationships, opportunities, and assignments. You did not design all of it, and you should not worship any of it. But you are responsible for what God entrusted to you.

If you spend your entire life trying to do it somebody else’s way, you may become an impressive chameleon and an absent version of yourself. You may win acceptance in rooms you were called to challenge. You may complete a degree that was never your assignment, protect a career that slowly kills your conviction, maintain a family role built around dysfunction, or keep shrinking until everybody else is comfortable with your size.

There comes a moment when you have to stop changing colors.

For me, one of those moments happened in Calculus. I stood up, walked out, and changed direction. I did not yet understand salvation, Scripture, calling, obedience, or the Good Shepherd the way I do now. But the Shepherd knew me before I knew how to recognize His voice. He was already using discomfort to interrupt a life being built from borrowed expectations.

Maybe your moment is not dramatic. Maybe you do not need to walk out of anything today. Maybe you need to tell the truth in one conversation, submit the application, stop hiding the gift, break the family pattern, return to church, ask for help, finish the work, start the business, set the boundary, repair the relationship, or remain faithful in the place you desperately want to escape.

The goal is not to perform difference.

The goal is to obey.

Galatians 1:10 asks whether we are trying to win the approval of human beings or of God. That question exposes the chameleon. Every room makes demands. Every group has colors it rewards. Every family has an unwritten script. Every industry has assumptions. Every audience has applause it can offer and withdraw.

But only one voice gets to name the assignment.

A black sheep becomes dangerous when the Shepherd’s voice matters more than the flock’s approval.

I am grateful for the strange roads, the awkward exits, the relationships across every social circle, the move across the country, the risks, the education, the business rooms, the global travel, the thick skin, the healing of the walls, and the woman beside me who carries some black wool of her own.

I am even grateful for the years I tried to fit in, because I now know the exhaustion of living in borrowed colors.

I do not need to return to that life.

I do not need every person to like me. I am not ice cream. Even ice cream cannot make everybody happy, although it has a better chance than most of us.

I do not need to reject every crowd, refuse every correction, or manufacture controversy so I can feel different. I do not need to make isolation a personality. I do not need to prove I am the one special sheep worth leaving the flock to find.

I was worth finding because I belonged to the Shepherd.

So were you.

Now that He has found us, the next step is not to keep wandering. It is to know His voice, follow His direction, accept the color He gave us, and finish what He entrusted to us.

Stop hiding.

Stop changing colors.

Follow the Shepherd.

Live dangerous.

Scripture to Carry

“Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine ... and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?” — Luke 15:4

“Your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish.” — Matthew 18:14

“I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me.” — John 10:14

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” — Romans 12:2

“Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God?” — Galatians 1:10

“You are a chosen people ... God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness.” — 1 Peter 2:9

Prayer

Good Shepherd, thank You for knowing me before I knew how to recognize Your voice. Thank You for searching for me when I wandered and carrying me when I could not find my own way home. Forgive me for building an identity around rejection when my truest identity is belonging to You.

Show me where I have become a chameleon. Reveal the rooms in which I perform, the relationships in which I disappear, and the expectations I have mistaken for assignments. Renew my mind so I am transformed by Your truth instead of conformed to every environment I enter.

Heal the wounds beneath my independence. Soften the walls I built to survive rejection. Teach me to care more about what You think without becoming unable to receive correction from the people You send. Keep me humble enough to admit when I am wrong and courageous enough to obey when the crowd is wrong.

Do not let being set apart become superiority. Do not let solitude become isolation. Do not let authenticity become an excuse for immaturity or risk become a substitute for faithfulness. Take every unusual gift, experience, burden, and ability You placed in me and make it useful to Your Kingdom.

Give me courage to stop changing colors. Give me wisdom to recognize the assignment. Give me endurance when obedience feels lonely. Surround me with people who know Your voice, tell the truth, and refuse to let fear lead.

I belong to You. The flock does not name me. Rejection does not define me. Approval does not own me. My past does not disqualify me. You are my Shepherd, and I will follow where You lead.

In Jesus’ name, amen.

Music Connection

“Reckless Love” — Cory Asbury

The song connects to the relentless search at the center of Jesus’ parable: the Shepherd does not treat the missing one as expendable. He moves toward the lost, overcomes distance, and brings home the one who could not rescue itself.

That truth keeps this Field Note from becoming a self-congratulatory anthem for people who like being different. The black sheep is not saved by its uniqueness. It is saved by the Shepherd’s love. We do not earn belonging by standing out, and we do not lose our value when we wander. We belong because He chose to come after us.

Listen after reading and ask one question: Where have I mistaken feeling unwanted by the flock for being unwanted by God? Let the song answer with the character of the Shepherd—and then let being found become the beginning of obedience rather than the end of the story.