Aim for the Bushes: The Power of Stupid

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God uses our stupid as well as our best thought out plans and efforts

I don't know what super power you possess, but occasionally, I have had the Power of Dumb.

I've tried things and done things that, if I could go back and confront my earlier self, I would slap the stuffing out of him. Often times, I'm amazed that I'm still here on the planet, 'in the game' so to speak—that I haven't been benched for the duration or thrown off the field completely.

In spite of the occasional desire to go back and change the course of my life, these events and situations didn't kill me. Burnished with time and telling, many of them make great stories and are consolations when life is slower and I have time to pick up my memories and dust them off like so many souvenirs and curios kept on the brain shelf, and I get to laugh. So do others, apparently.

Laughing at myself over the years, I've come to the conclusion that God uses our stupid as well as our best thought out plans and efforts—no ingredient gets wasted or left out—and my experience is that God tends to do more work with the former than He does with latter, based on the fruit I see from each. I don't know why this is, but in Scripture it appears that He tends to prefer broken and discarded things over those that are well made, in good repair and dazzle the eye. It's speculation again, but I bet Jesus liked fixing and resurfacing a table just as much as He liked making a new one.

I think God even uses the big mistakes of our lives; He sometimes makes us indifferent, either to the difficulties and dangers surrounding us at the time or the size and even impossibility of situation before us when considered in all of its intricate and web-like complexities. Sometimes we aim for the bushes... We say things like, 'Hey, what could happen?!' or 'I've got this!' and then we proceed into the maelstrom.

Why does God let us do it?

Bottom line: I don't know, He doesn't tell us. Even Christians, having the mind of Christ and being filled with the Spirit, get misdirected, lost, hurt and even dead by their poor choices, accidents and mistakes just like everyone else in this tired sitcom of a world. It's part of having two natures, the Old Adam and the New Man, bound together in our fallen flesh.

Death by humiliating blunder is not an enviable demise, but I wouldn't put it past God to use even that in His campaign to rescue all of us in Christ. As one of God's buffoons, I've made lots of what I would consider mistakes and errors and suffered the consequences, not unto death, but God has let me in on a little joke.

It's kind of a 'shaggy dog' joke that weaves itself in and out of my life—that hidden behind my very human, often flailing efforts at enjoying myself, making money, making friends, having adventure and the like... that hidden behind my intermittent Superpower of Stupid lies His subversive and hidden power to rescue and save even a clown like me and use my sometimes unwitting shenanigans to rescue others.