The Good, The Bad, The Middle

Ah, the curse of mediocrity. Oh, the bummer of always coming in 2nd place. You're almost there, but not quite. You're good, but not that good. I feel that way a lot of the time.
What's better? Being the worst, or being somewhere in the middle? If you're the worst, you're more likely to go unnoticed, which I know some people would love (including me). If you're 2nd or 3rd to "the best" (by whatever standards), it sure feels like you're the more prominent loser.
And continuing on this stream of thought that is passing through my brain right now -- confidence is a hard thing to come by. It's so hard to come by in fact, that most of the time it is faked. I am guilty as charged on that one. How is it that I can find confidence when there is this "curse of mediocrity" going around?
Do you ever find yourself going from click to click, from circle to circle at big parties, and constantly being on the outside of them all? Most of the time it's because you instantly classify yourself as someone less important than they who have taken reign over the airspace. The irony is; a lot of the time they hog the airspace because of a lack of self-confidence in some area in their life.
Why is it that that is so? In some area, we all land in the middle, and we reeeeeeally don't like it. Why? It racks my brain. Why does it bother me so much? Should I care?
Now, I actually don't have any good answer for the last question. Should we care or should we not care? I'll let you answer that. But I will take a stab at why we might feel those insecurities.
Just as I believe in God, I believe in his Enemy, Satan. I believe that he constantly attacks us to get his footholds, and so much of the time, he attacks our level of confidence -- to boost it or to knock it down. For the strong of faith, for the fighting, loving Christians, it is to take it down. What are we without our confidence in who we are? We are not fighters, that is for certain. We are not lovers either. We get wrapped up in ourselves in our self-conciousness, and the Enemy gets us focussed on our flaws, and the flaws of one another. In hind-sight, we whisper back to ourselves that we should've known better in the moment of that weakness. We should know more than anyone, there is no scale of better or worse that matters here on this foolish, bumbling planet that somehow manages to stay on its axis. But, when turned in on ourselves because of Satan's prodding, we create that scale, and we start sorting people on it, including ourselves. For me, I keep finding myself knocked lower and lower down the scale. I hate the way I talk in public. I hate the way I talk one on one. I hate they way I talk to girls. Heck, I just hate the fact that I talk. But God is always giving me something to say or write, so I guess it'd be wrong to not say some things (I still hate the way I talk to girls, though).
That scale is NOT what God is about. There shouldn't be winners and losers. According to Jesus, if someone lays some scale or chart out in front of you, it's better to be a loser and have only God than a winner and have only them (Matt 20:16). Do you believe that? I certainly do.
If you find yourself "the middle-man" all the time -- God bless you! What a great place to be! You should not consider yourself a lesser, more insignificant person, because at that point you are saying God did not do a good job. We should not consider ourselves better than anyone ever! At that point, we're making them more insignificant than us, and once again denying God's craftmanship and purpose for their lives.
We're The Middle! And we're proud of it!