Learning to Stop Hiding

Will Bundy: Good morning, y'all.
I'm very scared right now, and so I'm going to try my best to stay on top.
I've got a nice little script in front of me, so I keep focused.
The last time I spoke in a chapel was my senior year at high school,
and I made a pretty epic weed joke that everyone thought was really funny,
and so I'm trying to bring that energy with me today.
So again, good morning.
If you don't know me, my name is Will Bundy.
I'm a junior here at LCU.
I'm one of the proud weathermen of Alpha Chi,
and I edit those epic announcement videos that you all see every time you are here.
Also, you may know me from the totally worthwhile and necessary videos
that I put on my Instagram every now and again.
But most importantly, I'm happy with who I am.
I'm comfortable with my place and my being, but I wasn't always so willing to accept myself.
Let's go back in time to Will in seventh grade.
Now, I will warn you, this is a pretty dark time for me, not only emotionally,
but in the way that I looked. You're about to see a picture that I willingly posted on my Instagram
that I thought was really cool
and that I thought all the ladies would come flocking to.
The long hair and pimples was the look back then,
if you can imagine.
When I started at Midland Christian,
I was a tall, skinny dork.
Not too dissimilar from now,
but I've put on a few muscles since then.
Something you should know about MCS
is that sports is everything.
While this is not something that is inherently true only at MCS, it's very important to my story.
For your 7th and 8th grade years, you're required to have an athletic credit, which I think is common.
Now I have no problem with enjoying sports, with being part of a team, I've got no issue.
I can see why people like doing that. But sports was never for me.
I never, I don't like playing sports. You'll never see me on the intramural field because I'm, one, I'm trash, and two, I'm not going to have any fun.
But not liking sports was something that wasn't very accepted at MCS.
Especially for me, being a 6'5", 260-pound kid, it meant all of the eyes were on me.
All of the coaches were looking to me.
All of the basketball kids were looking to me to be on the team.
All the football kids were looking to me to be on the team.
And that was a lot of pressure for a seventh grader who had just started school at MCS.
And I did join the basketball team.
I was on the B team.
And the only reason I was on the B team was because I was tall.
You can see that nice little sheen of grease that was always in my hair because I never showered.
now I may look happy in that picture that's an Instagram photo I took and I said it was our
first win and I seemed pretty happy there but I absolutely hated being on that team I was miserable
every time I got on that field I was miserable on the bench I was miserable doing practices
I did not want to be there I was not good I only ever scored two points in the two years I played
basketball. Thank you. And I was made fun of every step of the way. When I was writing this talk,
I was trying to find specific moments that I could point out that really spoke to how I felt
and how much ridicule I faced. And I came to a very interesting conclusion. While there were
kids who trashed me, it was mostly the adults that made me feel bad. Coaches
made sure I knew that they did not think I was good. Parents of my
friends made sure they knew that they thought I was bad at the game and I
need to do better. I never felt like I fully belonged in anywhere at MCS. I
carried that weight that I was never good enough and that I wasn't worthwhile
to be where I was.
I even joined theater,
which was something I really enjoyed in high school.
But every time I would get on stage
and every time I do one act,
I always had this feeling like I was a failure,
like I shouldn't be here,
like no one wanted to see me up there.
After I graduated,
a lot of my friends slowly stopped talking to me,
which is common, but it hurt really bad.
And coming to LCU, I was a lonely kid
who really felt like he didn't deserve to be here
and had no one he could talk to.
The majority of my freshman year was spent in my dorm,
alone watching movies, gaming,
but I was always completely by myself.
I had told myself that no sane, normal person
would wanna be around me
and would wanna see the real me.
I wasn't a complete loner though.
I joined Alpha Chi Delta.
I joined hoping that I would find some people
whom I could fully reveal myself to.
Now if you don't know Alpha Chi, it's a lot of dumb jocks.
So I was terrified.
Because in Alpha Chi, I thought I saw the adults and kids
who bullied me in high school.
I saw how big sports were to these guys,
how big sports were to the foundation of this group,
and I was terrified.
I didn't wanna face the ridicule again.
And so I retreated into myself.
I hid my true self.
And many people that I consider my friends,
I wrote off as douchebags who didn't want to talk to me.
This all came to a head that summer.
That's a picture of me moving out at the end of my freshman year.
I had bottled all of these emotions,
all of these feelings and regrets within me into Camp Champion,
which was something that I went to all the time here
and something that I was really, really excited to be a part of as a counselor.
Now, I can usually take ribbings.
I'm good at laughing at myself.
But these kids were some of the most disrespectful stinkers I've ever met in my life.
Nothing I said really got to them,
and nothing I ever did really spoke to them.
I never really saw any change.
And usually I can really butt that slide, but because I had been carrying so much this feeling of inadequacy with me my entire freshman year, it really got to me.
It was a perfect storm of darkness where everything that I hated about myself, that I hated about other people, came to a head.
And I broke down crying in the middle of a counselor meeting.
And I told everyone I hated who I was.
I told everyone I felt that I was willing to end it all because no one really cared.
And I walked out of the room absolutely devastated and totally embarrassed that I allowed myself to get to that point.
I felt so weak, so alone, and so useless.
But then something happened that I did not expect to happen.
Tyler Carey, Ty Drury, and Chloe Clark.
Well, I guess it's Chloe Sandoval now.
Thanks for the invite.
They all came to me.
They all came to me while I was sitting crying outside of the KR.
And they sat with me, and they let me know that I was seen, that I was valuable, and that I was worth it.
And I want to thank y'all.
There's other people, but I want to thank y'all three.
Y'all really don't know what y'all did that night.
There was real darkness that y'all helped lift that night.
Now, this is where the story would typically end.
I found out I'm seen.
I have a bunch of friends now and we'll all live happily ever after.
But I'm anything but typical.
You see, I love to make things even harder on myself.
Now that I had these people supporting me,
I couldn't go around disappointing them, could I?
So I devised a really cool idea.
I would still hide my true self from them,
but only the parts that I thought were nerdy, dorky, and weird.
The plan worked because I didn't talk to anybody
without a great sense of dread within me.
Everyone I spoke to, hung out with, or even barely interacted with
got this washed and pruned image of Will Bundy,
an image that was not wholly me.
It was partly me, but nobody saw the kid who was struggling,
not if I could help it.
Now this brings us to last summer.
My dad is a youth minister over in Midland,
and that means every summer we get youth interns from here.
Last summer we had Ty Johnson and Cadence Hobbs.
These two are some of the greatest people that you will ever meet,
and I do encourage you to meet them if you haven't.
As I said, these two were awesome,
and I was really excited to hang out with them.
What I wasn't prepared for was to be changed by these two lovely people.
That summer, I had planned on just chilling like a villain,
not really expecting much out of the regular.
However, early in the summer,
Ty and Cadence asked if I wanted to come teach a class at Pine Springs.
I said yes, mostly because I didn't want to disappoint them,
and also because I really didn't want them to keep asking me.
And so the summer blew by.
It went by so fast I didn't encounter, I didn't do champion again,
and Pine Springs was right there.
And it was a lot quicker than I wanted it to be.
I was not super excited to be going up to Pine Springs.
I'd gone there as a camper and had kind of fallen out of love with it,
and so I was not excited to be asked to go back.
The first day of camp, though, things just felt different.
Here's some Pine Springs and Encounter pictures.
I felt like this intense weight lifted from me, and I had no idea why.
I felt so free being around Thai Cadence and the youth group.
If you've ever seen Radio Rebel, there's that scene where she's standing on the top of her school.
And she screams.
And she screams out that, I'm afraid to show everyone the real me.
That was my moment.
I had my little Radio Rebel moment at Pine Springs.
And it was such a cool time.
Everyone poured into me.
I felt so seen.
I felt so loved.
And it was so overwhelming that I didn't really know what to do with it.
people like Ty, Cadence, Carlin
McMinn, my dad, my sister
Ethan and Macy Curtis
the GCR youth and so many more
were there
and they didn't even expect anything of me
there were no expectations for me to be
this cool kid that was going to hang out
they just wanted to hang out with me
and that was really cool and that was something that I
had never
allowed myself to feel before, it was something
that I'm sure I had been invited
into but I never accepted that invitation
I never wanted to feel invited into those things.
I had so much fun.
If anyone here was there, I told a really funny campfire story about a farting wizard that everyone thought was really funny.
But that was something that I would never have done.
That was something I was never comfortable with about getting in front of people and being the real me.
I wouldn't even be up here if it weren't for that summer.
I have never felt this appreciation for who I am and for who God has made me to be until that summer happened.
And I didn't want this feeling to end.
And so as I was taking a look over the past years,
I had a little burp there.
See, as I was taking a look over the past years, kind of trying to come up with what I wanted to talk about,
But I found the most common cause of my misery.
It wasn't the people in my life.
It wasn't the clubs I joined.
It wasn't anything around me.
It was me.
I told myself that nobody wanted to see me.
Nobody wanted to be my friend and that I'd only disappoint everyone that I knew.
But that was never true.
Looking back at this past summer, I've had so much beauty and love fill my life.
I've honestly never felt as good as I do now
and it's all because I'm comfortable with who I am
I've accepted myself as the person God put on this earth
there was no mistake when he made me
because he made me to be me
and why would he be disappointed in who I am
so I shouldn't be either
this brings us to today
this is my encourage
I made this in Canva
I'm real artsy, if you didn't notice.
This is just from the, I think most of this is just from the past semester.
But look at that.
That's really cool.
Not only the craftsmanship, which is really cool, but also just all of the joy you see there.
It's really cool to see this on the big screen, see all the faces and all my friends.
Yeah.
There's my sweet mate, Zach Rogers.
This is my encouragement to everyone here.
Don't hide yourself anymore.
Don't censor the things that you think people won't like.
All you are doing is hiding the best parts of you
from people who want to see the real you.
And a quick aside to anyone who tries to pigeonhole
your friends or people in your life,
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry that you don't fit well enough
in the world you forced yourself into.
But I hope you realize there are better things for you.
Thank you all for listening.
You're dismissed.