I am, perhaps, the most individual individual you may ever know. My friends have told me that as have my wife and children. Anytime people preface something by saying, "Tom, you're the only person I know who could get away with that," you know that they think you were the reason the mold was destroyed and not just broken.

I hear young people today saying that they want to be an individual. So they wear a certain kind of jean, get multiple piercings and start amassing tattoos. And they look like all the other people their age who want to be individuals who have begun wearing a certain kind of jean, have multiple piercings and are covered in tattoos. (Someplace in there is a Fantasy Island, "De plane, de plane," joke)

Meanwhile businessmen read various articles concerning how to dress to be successful and they all wind up looking like a cookie cutter bakery line. Women try their best to be different from the rest
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to the point that most of them are similar in their differences. The point is, I learned a long time ago that who you are is not a matter of dress or appearance but your life. Live your life as well as YOU can and you will be an individual. Individuality is not based on how you express yourself in the outward person.

The inward person determines the depth of individuality that each one of us possess. I have been called, by a friend obviously searching for the correct appellation, a "conservatively liberal conservatively radical conservative." Jesus saved me from my sin, not my personality. He has done the same for you. We have been saved to live life, not in the cookie cutter line, but in the individuality line.

There is no certain "way" Christians are supposed to look. I take that back; there is. "There were certain Greeks among those who came up to worship at the feast. Then they came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida of Galilee, and asked him saying, 'Sir, we would see Jesus.' " John 12:20, 21 The world desperately needs us to look like Jesus. In your individuality express the fact that you are a Son or Daughter of God and show people your remarkable likeness to the one who died for you.