How stupid we sound...

If you noticed the description of this blog under the title, I hope you found humor and honesty in it. If you take yourself too seriously, from which I am a recovering addict, you may have missed them both. There have been many times that I have become keenly aware of how stupid we all must sound with our spoken or typed letters put together to form sounds, words, and phrases that ultimately are an attempt to articulate some thought formed in our brains. The process is full of limitations and there is more than enough room for a misstep. This doesn’t mean that we can’t “know “ something or be “accurate” in our observations. This isn’t an “either/or” proposition as we so often want to make it. It is not that you either know all truth or you know no truth. As we try our best to perceive, to process and to understand, maybe having an awareness of our limitations should cause us to always have one hand full of “possibility”.

I ran across an interview of author Peter Rollins here. As he was talking about our struggle with grasping God, he used this analogy. “It’s like being a sunken ship in the ocean. While the ocean contains all of the ship, the ship contains only a fragment of the ocean.” While we may be able to know, understand, or process some part of God, we cannot contain within our human brains all of Him. How silly we must look trying to organize him. How childish our buildings, suits and ties, committee meetings, and even our “worship services” must seem to Him. Imagine our rhetoric, our decisions, and our traditions piled up in a heap next to His uncontainable self. While God is indeed gracious towards us, it would serve us well to temper our theology, religious practices and discourse with this reality of our smallness.

Yet, this realization of our smallness during obvious moments of human triteness has not caused this point to reverberate within my soul. Instead, I have more readily experienced some part of its’ true power during moments of beauty. Moments when something beautiful seems to open my mind to the fact that there is beauty I am yet to conceptualize. The force of beauty filled with its’ strong arms of graciousness, redemption, mercy, and gentleness has snuck up on me in distinct moments and seemingly cracked my mind and heart open to the beautiful possibility that I have no idea where this is all headed. There are so many conclusions on what God will do and how He will do it, who He will save and who He won’t, when it will be and how you will know. These moments of beauty that open my mind to the smallness of what we claim to know in one hand, cause me to turn to the other hand full of possibility.

The possibility that we have no idea. The possibility that we will all be proven wrong. The possibility that we will look at each other with faces of amazement and confusion because we did not see this coming. I am convinced that God will do with this world and the souls within it something that has yet to be articulated with our little words. As if on that day when He begins to reveal all that our minds could not contain, some of us will be saying, “Just what I expected. The “movie” is just like the “book.”

It is easy to pick on our smallness and inadequacies, but that often leaves me uninspired. It is those times of beauty in its’ varying forms that cause me in awareness of my own stupidity to look above the fray of our conclusions and delight in the thought that our idiocy leaves room for God knows what…