“Can you believe that house?” I said to Jo, pointing at a bungalow a few hundred meters from the country road. “Look at the way it is placed. Why would anyone do a crazy thing like that?”
At first glance there was nothing unusual about the house. It sat on top of a hill that offered a magnificent view of the Rocky Mountains to the west, and an immense landscape of plains and pastures, fields and farms to the east.
The simple bungalow, designed to sit cheek by jowl between other houses in a city block, had windows at the front and back but blank walls on the sides. What stunned us was that the windowless walls faced east and west, blind to the hundreds of miles of fabulous scenery, while the large picture window looked north onto a dusty gravel road lined with weed filled ditches.
It may seem strange to us, but it makes perfectly good sense to them. My wife and I repeated this mantra, drilled into us decades before during cultural anthropology training. Practicing what we had learned during our life among Brazil’s indigenous peoples, we tried to think of some logical reason why the builder would place the house 90 degrees off the ideal. Try as we might, we just couldn’t come up with anything that made sense to us.
It bothered me that I was perplexed and perturbed, not by some strange custom in a faraway land, but by a common house just a few miles from our home. A house built by people of our own culture and our own background! What baffled us must have made perfect sense to the builders. They must have known things I didn’t know.
Canela Dance
It reminded us of numerous times we were perplexed in Brazil. One time, the village elders assured us that the main spring festival would start at dawn in three days. But when the third day came, nothing happened. We scratched our heads, waiting and wondering. Then, suddenly, in the middle of the afternoon on the fifth day, there it was: excitement, singing, dancing, and cooking fires! What had happened? A party of hunters, bringing the meat so vital to the ceremonies, had just arrived. Yeah, now it made sense, even to us.
I keep relearning this lesson: The greater the social or cultural distance between me and the person I am observing, the more likely I will end up scratching my head and wondering.
So what about the distance between us, human creatures, and our Creator? That distance is immense in every way. God Himself tells us, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isa 55:9)
How can you and I trust someone we just cannot understand? We can’t. Not easily. Not even when that Someone is God.
So here are two things I consider:
- If I can’t understand other human beings who are so like me, is it any wonder that I can’t understand God whose thoughts and behaviour are so far beyond me?
- If I learned to trust the indigenous people to know what they were doing, and I trust the builders had a logical reason for placing that house they way they did, why can’t I trust God too?
God will often do things we don’t understand. But they make perfectly good sense to Him. We won’t completely understand God until we see Him face to face in eternity. But we can trust what His prophets have said about Him.
Moses said, “God’s works are perfect, and all His ways are just.” (Deut. 32:4)
King David added to this description, “You, O God, are strong. You, O God, are loving.” (Ps. 62:11)
God is strong, loving, just, and perfect. He often does things that make us scratch our heads, but we can trust Him. So can the rest of the 6.9 billion people of the world.
If only they all knew Him.