#634. Having “This is weird, but …” moments.

God is weird.

Prayer is weird.

Faith is weird.

When you stop to think about it, being a born again Christian is a weird thing.

I believe that I have the power of the God who created the solar system inside me. I believe that the same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead flows in me and lives in me. I believe that at any given point in any given day, I can reach out to a holy Lord who set the entire universe in motion and have a conversation.

That is weird, but it’s also surprisingly easy to forget …

It’s easy to get lost in the knick knacks of Christianity, in the day to day grind of church life and community building and practicalities of faith. It’s easy to get so used to prayer or worship that you forget there’s an all powerful being we’re singing to. You forget that the hilarious mind behind the platypus and the beautiful mind behind the sunset is listening and watching and interacting with us.

It’s easy to have a sterile, boring faith.

But sometimes, God reminds us how weird and wonderful a relationship with Him really is. Sometimes, He reminds us that He is supernatural. Sometimes our ears and hearts are open wide enough to remember that He is deep and mystical and mysterious.

Sometimes we have a moment that forces us to say, “This is weird, but …”

Have you ever had one of those? It’s a moment where something so crazy happens to you that you can’t deny God’s existence but at the same time you can’t think of a way to logically explained what just happened to your friends. Ration and logic have been thrown out the window and as you start to share the story of what occurred, you can do nothing else but simply admit, “This is weird, but …”

That happened to my wife a few weeks ago.

Her cousin Camden was ill. Since he was a child, Camden had struggled with a condition similar to Muscular Dystrophy. When he was 10, what was at first just a tendency to be off balance and a little awkward was diagnosed as a serious, fatal illness. Slowly, over two decades, he lost control of his body. A running, smiling little boy ended up in a wheel chair. A young man in a wheel chair who loved to talk about Michael Jordan ended up blind and deaf. One by one, the functions of his body shut down while the strength of his mind remained.

On the morning of Sunday, September 20th before church my wife was praying and reading her Bible study. Suddenly she had a picture of Camden in her heart. An image of him dancing with his grandparents in heaven. He was singing and my wife was overwhelmed with how tall he was, having not seen him out of a wheelchair for a decade. He was happy and he was laughing and everything was OK.

An hour later, as we waited for church to start, my mother in-law called and let us know that Camden had died.

When I saw the call and said to my wife, “That’s weird, your mom is calling us,” she instantly knew what it was about. She knew that Camden was gone. She knew that he was dancing.

It’s tempting to try to explain away the weirdness of moments like that, to rationalize why my wife had a vision of the once crippled Camden dancing while hundreds of miles away in Florida he was leaving this earth at the very same moment. To pretend that wasn’t a tremendous gift from a Creator who knows and loves us, and maybe assume it was just a random passing thought.

But I can’t.

Our God is wonderful

Our God is unfathomable.

Our God is uncontainable.

Our God is weird.

Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever had a moment where something happened where you couldn’t do anything but say, “This is weird, but…?”

Let’s talk about that today, finish this sentence:

“This is weird, but __________”