I was convinced I could never have influence until I found a way to rise above all the odd traits and circumstances I had inherited. Here’s what I had to deal with.

In 1973, my mom prayed my dad out of being a rock n’ roll singer. After playing juke joints all over America and meeting Elvis Presley, dad returned to his Christian faith in a big way and eventually became a pastor. I didn’t quite see this as a great testimony at the time, however. All I saw was that I had to start living differently from the other kids. For the rest of our childhood, we could never miss church, we had to spend December 31st praying in the New Year and we couldn’t dance or go swimming with other kids. As I hung around the punch bowl all night while the other kids got wild at dances, I thought I was a little odd.

In 1977, my dad moved our family to the country and started an experiment in self-sufficiency. Over the next decade or so we raised our own fruits and vegetables, killed deer for meat and tended an assortment of chickens, pigs, goats, guineas, rabbits and honeybees. We chopped down trees to heat our house and recycled wood from old houses to build sheds and fences. Some Saturday mornings it seemed my parents were just making up new work projects to keep us busy. As I walked through chicken poop to collect eggs while the other kids played Atari and watched cable TV, I thought I was a little odd.

In 1979, I started getting passes to slip out of English class for special meetings. Because my grades were good, the other kids thought I was going to a gifted and talented class. But I was actually visiting a speech therapist. For some reason, when I tried to talk I would occasionally freeze up and stumble over the initial syllable in my words. Stuttering never made it easy to meet new people or to impress girls. I felt paralyzed by live conversation. As the impediment would grab my tongue and listeners would give me sympathetic looks, I thought I was a little odd.

It seemed I grew up with more things to make me feel odd than things that would help me be a person of influence. I had freckles. I was left-handed. I was several pounds heavier than my twin brother and had to endure the constant skinny/fat comparisons. Even the good grades I got in school often gave my classmates more reasons to pick on me than to like me. I often wondered what it would be like to just be normal.

I hoped college would give me an opportunity to just be like everyone else. Miles away from home and surrounded by people who didn’t know the early me, I had a chance to reinvent myself. Despite my attempts to blend in and spotlight my strengths, however, my odd little quirks kept surfacing. Although I made a lot of progress, it still seemed impossible to be anything more than a pudgy, left-handed, stuttering country preacher’s kid.

Not only did my efforts to be normal seem doomed, I also felt disqualified from ever being a person of influence. Ironically, it was in my graduate studies of people of influence in politics, business and Biblical times that I began to see my own childhood from a more hopeful perspective. I was humbled and encouraged to learn how many leaders rose to their positions in spite of — and often because of — the things that made them odd.

For his book, Entrepreneurial Life, David Silver studied a broad range of innovators to look for common elements. He found that they nearly all endured some form of shortcoming as an adolescent. The most common were small size, physical illness, less wealth than their peers, poor educational development or skin problems.

Theodore Roosevelt’s philosophy of the “strenuous life” marked his presidency and launched America into the 20th century. But that philosophy grew out of his dedicated effort to overcome the asthma and frailty that plagued him in his youth.

Winston Churchill was considered the voice that carried Great Britain through World War II, but early on he had speech problems that he overcame by among other things, talking with pebbles in his mouth.

Helen Keller is one of the best examples of a person choosing to build a courageous life out of the difficult one she inherited. She once said, “The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse.”

The Bible is a virtual who’s who of influential oddballs.

Moses questioned God’s selection of him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt because he spoke with “faltering lips.”

Before David became the greatest king of Israel, he was an unheralded shepherd who was so young and unspectacular that his dad didn’t even include him in the line-up of his sons for Samuel to consider for king.

John the Baptist paved the way for Christ but was considered strange for his habit of wearing clothes made of camel hair and eating locusts and wild honey.

Paul eventually wrote half the New Testament but he started out on the wrong side of the issue and was plagued by a “thorn in the flesh.” Paul explained to the Corinthian church, however, that God can turn weaknesses, differences and failures — often our greatest causes of insecurity — into tools of His ultimate purpose.

Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things — and the things that are not — to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. (1 Cor. 1:26-29)

God doesn’t excuse us from doing great things for Him just because we’re a little odd. More often God allows us to be odd in order to build the character required to perform great works in His kingdom. As I look back over my early years I can see how God used so many of the things I thought made me a little odd to prepare me for plans He had for me later in life.

When I pull out Elvis Christmas music each year, I have to wonder what my life would be like if my dad had raised me as a rock n’ roll roadie instead of a preacher’s kid. Maybe I would have had a wild ride and still found a way back to God, but I’m thankful now that my most impressionable years weren’t wasted ones.

When I face a busy day at the office followed by a night of juggling family time and freelance projects, I’m thankful for the work ethic that grew out of my days in the country. It wasn’t always fun as a kid, but I know I wouldn’t have the appetite to take on the work I do now if it hadn’t been for the standard my parents developed back then. As a bonus, I’ve also come to enjoy the times when my devotional reading includes scriptures about planting, harvesting, pruning and other agricultural metaphors. Thinking back to my experiences in the country those passages have a depth I otherwise would have never known.

When I give speeches these days, people in the crowd can’t detect that I once had a stuttering problem. But what I think is more miraculous than how God directed me into public speaking is how he used my early speech problems to improve my writing. I know I have plenty of room to grow as a writer, but I look back now and see how the most growth occurred during those awkward years when I developed the habit of trying to communicate on paper the things I so often embarrassed myself trying to speak in public.

So that’s my experience. What’s yours? Are there quirks you’ve anxiously tried to keep tucked away? Family experiences you’ve hoped would just recede into the past? Maybe God’s got a plan for you as well. The things you find odd may be the very tools He is using to shape your character for His glory. His purposes aren’t always obvious, but his track record offers assurance that He’s probably up to something good.