So Absurd

            In 2009, I traveled to Kenya with Don Pittman.  We worked for about a week in Nairobi before taking a couple of days to go on a safari.  Safari, by the way is a Swahili word simply meaning journey.  If you go to Huntsville, you are going on a safari.  Of course, this safari was the kind with all sorts of wild animals.  Apart from the animals, the scenery alone was remarkable.  God truly outdid himself in Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Park.  I have personally never felt so tangibly close to God as when I was there.  The animals were just as magnificent as the landscape.  Seeing a giraffe up close does make you wonder if God was a little off he day He created those creatures because their design is very illogical.  But they are beautiful and so very graceful as they prance across the savannah.  As we were driving along the dirt roads, dodging elephants and getting within reaching distance of lions, I was struck by the absurdity of the situation.  It is so incredibly unlikely that a guy who grew up in small town Alabama and a guy who grew up in small town Tennessee would make it halfway across the world to see in person what most people only witness on television or in National Geographic Magazine.  It was a totally foreign world to most people, but we were blessed with the opportunity to spend two days in it.  To this day, I still laugh at the absurdity of situation.  

            I’ve come to understand that God enjoys absurdity.  He likes doing things that seem illogical to us.  Jesus explicitly states so in Matthew 11:25-26 when he prays, “thank you for hiding these things from those who think themselves wise and clever, and for revealing them to the childlike.  Yes, Father, it pleased you to do it this way!”  God’s ways are not our ways, and many times God’s ways make no sense to us (even those of us in His church).  For example, consider how Jesus dealt with the apostles.  In Matthew 28, his last recorded words in that gospel are commissioning them to “go and make disciples of all nations.”   He’s telling them to go change the world.  We would likely never expect a mere 12 men to be able to change the world in such a fundamental way.  We especially would never expect them to do so with no formal training or financial resources.  Knowing that he would one day give them this task, Jesus did not send them to school for 20 or so years.  He did not even enroll them in a single church growth workshop.  He simply let them walk beside him for three years, teaching them as he had opportunity.  He didn’t leave them with a large endowment to provide a work fund either.   Instead, he told them to mooch off of others.  Most experts would dismiss that strategy as flawed at the very least and deem it failed even before implementation. 

            At Central, our stated purpose is very simple: make disciples who make disciples.  This doesn’t apply just to the paid ministry staff, shepherds, or ministry leaders.  This responsibility belongs to everyone.  One might say that he/she is an unlikely person to be used for that purpose, possibly due to a lack of knowledge, mistakes from the past, or youth/inexperience.  Whoever says that is correct.  We are all unlikely people to do that job.  But, that’s just the way God likes it.  Just like the apostles, we have the very Spirit of God empowering and guiding us.  That, not our own capability, is what makes us competent ministers.  Guess what? It will work for us as unlikely people just as it did for the absurdly unlikely apostles.  That’s how God works.