March 18th, 2021" God's Humors

 

God sometimes has a great sense of humour. Yet, He is doing that to reveal our broken self to us. God's messages can come to us through various funny moments of our lives.


My wife still tells me the thought she had when she was a teenager. Her mom was driving her home from the hospital where her dad worked. She saw a Vietnamese restaurant and thought to herself: "Vietnamese restaurant? Who in the world would eat that food?" Well, she now has it as often as she needs. Having Vietnamese food is easy. Being married to one is another story.

Lighten Up: God's Goofy Sense of Humor - Greg Boyd - ReKnew

I came home after a teaching trip to a university a few years ago. I was teaching on "Cross-Cultural Challenges in Contemporary Churches". My youngest daughter sat down next to me on the couch and said: "You and mom will never understand us". Although I was surprised, I agreed with her. I asked her to explain her thoughts behind that statement more to me. " You were born in Vietnam, Ông and Bà (my parents) are both Vietnamese. Mom was born in the US, and her parents were born there too. We have are Amerasian, one parent is Vietnamese, and the other is American. We have our own culture". Remember that I just got back from giving lectures about different cultures in the church. I was humbled by what God was telling me about different cultures within my own family.


A Baptist congregation invited me to teach a few years back. I was supposed to give two sermons on that Sunday. I was in a hurry in the morning and took the evening sermon to the morning service. I usually memorized my talks, so that was not a problem. The real problem was I could not be distracted by a wrong note, and this congregation got nervous when a preacher had no note. So I took a blank sheet of paper and pretended that was my note. I even glanced at it once so often as if I was checking it while preaching. Well, everything went well until the senior pastor came up and prayed for me. He was baffled when he saw a blank paper. So I whispered to him: "I see things you do not see, brother". The topic of the morning sermon was " Open our eyes so that we might see".


God uses humour to overcome our bias, pride in what we know, and our fears of not knowing.


Hebrews 11: 12


"And so from this one man (Abraham), and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore."

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