(Zippers and High Heels)
Dwelling Place City Church
How many of you can remember back to your grade school years? Specifically the sixth grade – the teacher, the room, your classmates? I know for some of you it’s probably a long stretch – for me it was an extremely pivotal year. Why? My teacher that year was one Mr. (Preach) Lyerla – funny, exacting, and challenging! He instilled in every student a love for a hot game of German Dodgeball, witty poetry, and words!
I discovered that words can encourage or discourage, make people laugh, spread gossip, hurt a heart, or write a great term paper. Some of my favorite words are actually oxymorons; a figure of speech in which contradictory terms are combined. Some fun classics include: clean dirt, dry lake, icy hot, good grief, found missing – and my all time favorite – sensitive guy! THAT one is priceless!
Just for fun I sat down and decided to see how many oxymorons I could use in a single sentence. Here’s what I came up with: “The jumbo shrimp tasted awfully good, even though it brought up bittersweet memories from our working vacation with our adult children when we were alone together and our pretty ugly dog was found missing following the crash landing, but it was our only choice.”
To most of us that paragraph made perfect sense. Scary because there are ten contradictions in that one paragraph and you probably breezed right through it.
The other day I was thinking about the uniqueness of God and it came to me that God may be the ultimate oxymoron! Think about it for a minute: on one hand He is totally predictable. In fact, in Malachi 3:6 He tells us: “I am the Lord, I change not…” Truer words have never been spoken His faithfulness endures forever. His mercies are new every morning. His love is from everlasting to everlasting, and forgiveness is ours for the asking. All that is the constant and dependable character of God – totally unchanging and always predictable.
But, while the character of God is predictable, the acts of God are amazingly unpredictable. As a matter of fact, He can be so unpredictable it boggles the brain. Just think about all the ways God fed people throughout the Bible. You would think that once He did something a certain way that would be His forever-blueprint. But no, not God.
Wandering in the desert for 40 years, manna fell from the sky every morning for the Israelites to eat. Pretty unique way to feed people, wouldn’t you say?! But then He decided to feed Elijah via airmail each day by sending ravens with food. And let’s not forget about the loaves and fishes Jesus took from a boys lunch basket and multiplied, which fed 5,000 men plus women and kids.
So I’m thinking, we are made in the image of God in so many ways. We too are both predicable and unpredictable. Predicable for me means I strive to be a faithful, honest, trustworthy, and forgiving person – all character issues.
But on the other hand, I am made to be out-of-the box creative. I believe we should be innovative souls, not content with business as usual. When someone says, “But we’ve never done it that way before” our response should be, “Yes – and isn’t that wonderful.” I mean, who is the brain who thought up bubble wrap? Or how about all those ingenious egg cartons? And who’s the savvy soul who thought up pockets?
What terrific ideas! Man has been gifted by our Creator with the smarts and creativity to invent airplanes, sticky notes, submarines, roller coasters, cars, balloons, high heels, caller ID, windshield wipers, zippers, and, thankfully – the snooze button. It makes me remember something delightful Albert Einstein once said: “Creativity is intelligence having fun!” That’s rich! Do you think that maybe God had fun while creating the double-humped camel, the long-trunked elephants and striped zebras?! I think perhaps so!
Bob and Susan Beckett pastor The Dwelling Place City Church at 27100 Girard Street in Hemet. For more information you can visit them at DPCityChurch.com.
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