I was recently telling a friend that in the span of a year, I've gone from being gainfully employed and well established in L.A. to being unemployed, living in an RV in the country, and sending out spam emails. Clearly, I told her, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.
What's gone wrong, it seems, is that I elected to follow my hunch that God was calling me and my family to a different sort of life. Well... it's certainly different.
It got me to thinking, too (it doesn't take much to get me thinking these days). The Good Book tells us that the way of God is foolish from the world's perspective. Okay, so what if? What if God's way of living really is foolish? Now, I'm not saying that every foolish (or ignorant, or stupid, or offensive) way of living is ordained by God. There are, of course, many heinous things done in the name of God that even make God blush. I'm talking about actually following the Son of Man in the way one lives. I guess, if you think about it, and you happen to dust off that leather bound book sitting underneath old copies of People Magazine or Guns and Ammo or The Economist, it makes sense that God's way wouldn't be the world's way. Otherwise, why all the noise for two millennia? And it wouldn't even make sense if God's way was just a teeensy bit different from the world's way. I mean, why bother then, right? If Paul wasn't kidding when he wrote in his first letter to the church in Corinth that "God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; the weak things of the world to shame the strong...", then maybe God's dark sense of humor is, by definition, subversive, counter-intuitive, even foolish. I don't, by the way, see a difference between Divine Humor and Divine Calling. They are one and the same.
I was recently listening to a song on one of the only Christian music albums I own (I own four, and you haven't heard of three of them...) called "Fool's Wisdom" by Malcolm and Alwyn, and it has these lyrics:
Funny how when you think you're right Everybody else must be wrong Till someone with fool's wisdom Somehow comes along
His voice is strange and the words He said I didn't quite understand Yet I knew that He was speaking right
By the leather-backed book in his hand.
Could it really be that simple? Could it?
Really?
Maybe God's wisdom is so inscrutable because it's so simple. Maybe God is so hard to see because he's all around us. Maybe things aren't what they seem because we can't see them for what they are.