Man Plans…God Laughs by Jason Dass
October 3, 2011
I was helping my buddy Dwight set up for a show downtown when we started talking about our wives. Dwight said he couldn’t figure out how he ended up with such a kind, loving, beautiful wife. And it got me wondering how I ended up in the same situation! Dwight said: “God must really love me…. Or have a really strange sense of humor.” My immediate response was to agree with God having a strange sense of humor. We are two chubby, bearded guys living in a world where being chubby and bearded would normally exclude us from having mates at all, much less attractive, loving mates. But that is when I really started thinking about God’s sense of humor.
As I was driving home from work tonight, I was looking forward to getting home, relaxing, and getting some chow in me. Then God decided it’s high time He poked His head in to disrupt my plans. Hence: Man plans, God laughs. I started thinking, God has an awesome sense of humor. But how many people know that? I’m blessed with a church family that is well aware of it, but a lot of Christians I’ve met have yet to figure that out.
Maybe they’re caught up in the Old Testament passages where God is raining down punishment on a disillusioned and disobedient Israel. Maybe. But I think many people spend a lot of time thinking about how God is teaching them by poking them in the eye or giving them a little smack on the nose. They forget that He loves us. And if you love someone, you want to laugh with them. We spend so much time taking ourselves so seriously that we forget how silly we are. Just listen to me speak in pretty much any social situation. I stumble over my words, use words that don’t make sense (and most of the time I’m totally unaware of it), or just lose my train of thought mid-word. It’s silly. Maybe it’s because I’m Irish. Everything really is quite funny. And you think God wouldn’t know this?
Take the platypus, for instance. It’s some weird cross between a duck, beaver, and something with poison spurs. POISON SPURS! Would you look at an oddball creature that most people make fun of and think of as being cursed and expect poison spurs? I wouldn’t. Now, I’ve gotta point out that the first person to find those things wasn’t laughing very hard. Well, maybe, if they were Irish. They would laugh later at what seems to be the absolute absurdity of it and at their foolishness for not checking the thing for built-in weapons in the first place. I would, after I got done writhing in mind-numbing agony.
Now, let’s take it a step further. Try to look at yourself the way God does. When I do this, I see a bumbling child absolutely delighted at discovering that there’s something beyond my nose. AND IT MOVES!!! The whole world is a spinning, barely (if at all) comprehensible mass of things we really don’t have a solid grasp on. But we claim to know it all. Oh, we can identify cells, cell components, atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks, gluons, and all sorts of interesting things. And we try to think our way through it. Then we argue because our way has to be right. Right? Then we kill each other. We commit foolish, stupid, ignorant, and sometimes evil acts, all in the name of being right. Then God picks us up, sets us on our feet, and watches us blunder to the coffee table and knock something else over. If you’ve got kids, you’ve gotta see the humor in that situation. And look at our theories. We’ve got so many ideas that we can barely make sense of them. Evolution? Possible, maybe even probable, within a small, isolated community utterly separate from everything else. But on a large scale….There’s a reason it’s still a theory, folks. String, Superstring, Quantum Mechanics/ Foam and other assorted theories. They’re genius! And we can’t verify them. Ever watch a kid try to stuff a square peg through a round hole over and over again and catch yourself laughing? I do.
Then there’s the other reason He laughs. Like when your child finds the square hole after hours of trying to make it fit. You laugh with joy. You are absolutely delighted that they learned. You think it’s any different for God when we figure out that all we have to do is ask and He’ll grant us eternal life along with a bucketful of other benefits? When we figure it out, nothing delights Him more. And He laughs. As much time as He spends heartbroken over our refusal to acknowledge Him, or our outright hatred of Him in some cases, I think He spends just as much time laughing with joy in His heart whether it’s with us when we misstep and chuckle about it, or when we learn more of Him and His joy is beyond imagining.
You see, folks, God laughs. A lot. It’s not all fire, brimstone and condemnation. In fact, most of the time, it’s not. God’s just waiting for us to open our hearts so He can laugh with us, share in our joy, and make a new creature from the broken things we pieced together ourselves. Go ahead, laugh with Him. It’s delightful. And your life will be much the better for it.
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