There’s something you should know. There are people walking around this world who just look lost. They tend to sit and stare, raise ridiculous questions, and just down-right act differently than you and me. Well, different than you; I happen to be one of them. We are those who think, like, more than normal. Who think without even thinking. Who tend to spoil the moment with their overactive realism. This is a confession of one such hyperactive cranium so that we may better understand each other as brothers and sisters in God’s family.
Those of us who tend to be on the more intellectual side seem to have very dangerous minds. If I could shrink you down Fantastic Voyage style and let you travel around in my brain, you’d see it rarely stops; I think it takes Christmas off. That’s the dangerous thing of it though, it never stops. We’re always thinking.
What are we thinking about? Everything! Have you ever thought as to why birds can fly and you cannot? Why dinosaurs are now extinct? Why God exists in three persons, one of them being 100% human, but is one god? Have you ever thought of these things all at the same time? This is the horrible life I and countless others are forced to suffer through. (Please RSVP to my pity party c/o clayton.zylstra@gbaships.org.)
One such consequence to this overactive intellect is the deprivation of hope. Given enough time to think through something, I can convince myself of anything about that something. When this happens, due to my human nature, I tend to rule out hope. Hope to me, in my most desperate hour, is a failure to see reality as it stands. If I have hope my sick grandmother will be healed, I fail to see the situation as it stands; her body is frail and she has to go sometime. If I hope that salvation will someday come to the world, I fail to see the brokenness of humanity and the sheer astronomical impossibility for everyone in the world to come to one agreement about who Jesus was and is; there are some people who love to disagree.
However, there is hope. Consider Matthew 22:37, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and all your mind.” I tend to find loving God with all my heart and soul quite simple (when you have very little of either, all of it isn’t that much). But I struggle to love God will my entire mind as evidenced with the depressing paragraph preceding this one. However, there are some of you who have no difficulty loving God with your mind (this is not to say you don’t have one as was implied by my finding simplicity in loving God with my heart and soul), but struggle with loving will all heart or soul. You can help me. You can help us. We can help you.
Luckily God made us all different; different because He put us in a community to depend on each other to lift up our weaknesses. You are to show us brainiacs how to love with our mind and we are to show you romantics how to give God your heart and we all need to show the spiritual wanderers how to love God with their souls. You are to remind us realists there is hope.
So, if you see someone sitting alone, staring off to nowhere, it might be tempting to just leave them alone, but it would be real encouraging to just walk by and say, “Don’t worry, there is hope.”
