Strange Day Ahead

I grew up see­ing com­mer­cials made by the TV Evangelist, Oral Roberts. Back then, he was just begin­ning to build what became quite a reli­gious empire. The slo­gan asso­ci­ated with him was: “Some­thing good is going to hap­pen to you today.” I have always liked that. It takes pos­i­tive thoughts to build great things. Oral Roberts Uni­ver­sity is known around the world. Mr. Roberts was known for some eccen­tric­i­ties, but those can be over­looked. Who among us are exempt on that one? The greater the per­son, the greater the quirks…

My twist on life is more along the lines of a slo­gan that goes like this: “Some­thing strange is going to hap­pen to you today.” I think that would prob­a­bly fit the view­point of the early church a bit bet­ter. I am sure they were pos­i­tive thinkers — at least they had their ver­sion of it — but I believe it was the unex­pected that really caught their attention.

Some late night fish­er­man peers out on a stormy lake and sees a man walk across the lake to a boat full of fright­ened men. Now that would be weird! He would ques­tion his own san­ity but con­clude, once the boat reached shore, that his eyes had not fooled him at all. He would never be the same again. The list would go on: Thou­sands of peo­ple were sud­denly fed from nowhere. A man born blind begins to see per­fectly. Lep­ers are healed. The dead are raised back to life. You know, after a while, you would begin to expect the unexpected.

That is how I live. I expect the unex­pected. For me it is not about a mir­a­cle here or there. It is about an insight, a real­iza­tion, or an unex­plain­able set of occur­rences. When you real­ize the strange mir­a­cle of life itself, you do not really need any­thing greater to stir your soul’s imag­i­na­tion. You just live in pos­i­tive expec­ta­tion. Sooner or later, you will catch the Cre­ator out of the cor­ner of faith’s eye.

We live in such arro­gant times. Pseudo-experts claim to be able to explain pretty much every­thing. What they do not have the humil­ity to real­ize is that just because they can make obser­va­tions and attach terms to them does not mean they have explained any­thing at all. They have only described them inad­e­quately. A famous physi­cist once said, “We will under­stand the uni­verse when we finally grasp its strange­ness.” So far we have not done this.

Per­son­ally, I am look­ing for the strange­ness of it all. Before this day is over, I am bet­ting I catch another glimpse (and maybe because I am a lit­tle bit strange myself).