I may not totally understand God’s sense of humor, but on this route with Him, I’ve grown to appreciate it more each day. I’ll spare you of all the terrible religion talk, now I grew up in the church, but I’ve always had a powerful distaste for the notoriously ineffective and distancing holier-than-thou rhetoric. So, never been that Christian.
Now, I used to wonder why life must be so unpredictable, why we can’t just know our purpose or the future and just make daily steps advancing towards it—save us all the trouble of trying to always figure things out (and often failing even at that). Then, I came across a quote that gave me my aha moment, “Thank you Lord for not showing me what the future holds because it pushes me to the One that holds the future.”
See the thing is, God is more interested in our willingness—or better yet, our audacity—to trust Him in light of the tumultuous currents we’re traversing rather than our desire to show him how deserving we are of that thing we’ve been praying for. If it’s always going to be about you working relentlessly for everything you going to get in this life, then you don't need God. This is not saying don’t work at it, the work is our part to play, but are you leaving room for God to move? Thus, aim higher, dream bigger, desire more than where your work will take you! It’s you and God in this equation, with God willing to be the bigger factor. Even when they don’t get your “lunacy”, God is leveraging opportunities to make a believer out of your spectators.
I recently forced my husband to watch the movie Selena for the first time—which he loved! Abraham, Selena’s father, who failed in achieving his dream of becoming a Mexican-American artist due to racism in the south, told his daughter, “…all the barriers that have stopped people before…and you went straight through them like they didn’t exist. Maybe for you, they don’t exist.” This is precisely what God wants to reveal to us on our course with him, the obstacles of the common men don't have to exist for us who put our trust in Him. That table they said you don’t belong on, that position they said you didn’t deserve, that dream they told you was out of reach, that program they said you couldn’t enter—go for it! Even when they say, "but no one has done it," you can do it.
Not only does God have a sense of humor, but He's an absolute show-off and he doesn’t like the mundane. He says in Isiah 43:19, “I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” So, forget trying to mimic everyone else's success, while it’s beautiful to find inspirations in others, use that to fuel you to want even more because God wants to use us differently to unveil the various facets of His might and creativity as they are boundless.
I share this because I’ve been living this in my life most recently. I’ve been praying more these days and God has been answering my prayers in ways I cannot even begin to express. I can almost imagine Him with the silliest face responding to some of my requests like “really? That’s it?”, “Child! you underestimate me,” “I’ve been waiting for you to ask,” etc. It’s not to say that sometimes He won’t answer “no,” or have you wait as He only wants what’s good for us (timing playing an important factor), but this is to remind you that as you're working on it, start praying for it. And when you pray, be bold, be daring--pray for more!
When was the last time your faith in God manifested in a way that surprised others around you?