We Are Weird
People who don’t know Jesus think we are weird. They wonder why we would want to spend time with God. They can’t understand how we believe that we can pray about things and see God answer. They have never experienced being filled with God’s Presence through spending time with God in worship and prayer. They hear us talking about faith in the middle of things that are going wrong in our lives and just don’t know how we can say that God is in the middle of the storm we are walking through.
Our friend, Pastor Dave Knickerbocker, has some thoughts about our weirdness.
Weird in a good way
Our two daughters are in middle school, and early on they fell right in line with pre-teen idiosyncrasies. One trend involved insulting somebody in a kind voice and immediately following it up with “but not in a bad way.” This phrase has magical powers in tweenie-land that mitigate the (somewhat) cloaked verbal attack.
“Your clothes don’t match . . . but not in a bad way.”
“You’re not as skinny as you used to be . . . but not in a bad way.”
Sometimes they’d switch it up by presenting its positive variant: “Your hair is getting gray . . . but in a good way.”
During a series at our church called “Weird,” I wanted to share this phenomenon, but I couldn’t recall examples. On the way to church I asked Jess, 12 years-old at the time, to refresh my memory. After coming through with several she asked me what the series was about.
I told her and she responded, “Wait a minute! Are you going to tell the church that you think I’m weird?”
“Yes,” I replied “. . . but in a good way.”
Your faith will make you look weird to those who don’t understand it. People who act ways that aren’t ordinary are considered strange. Hebrews 11 is known as the faith chapter, but I prefer calling it the weird chapter. Abel gave the best he had to a God he couldn’t see, Abraham took odds on a long shot for a lasting legacy and Noah built a huge boat in the middle of a desert. God told them to do these things, and they did, despite how weird they looked.
Anticipate your weirdness. Embrace it. And as people with raised eyebrows and furrowed foreheads shake their heads in disbelief, know that you’re weird in a good way.
Dave Knickerbocker is the Outreach and Youth Pastor at Evangel Baptist Church in Boardman, OH. This article is taken from his blog, Pasture-ized.
Click here for other articles that Dave has shared with us at Daily-devotionals.com.
