Arrrggg-uing with God

The year was 2013 and I received an email from a former coworker wondering if I would like to make some money to do a special project for a company that I had worked for several years before. The assignment was to build a skull for Halloween for a client of theirs.

 

I should probably interject that I am way too spiritual to celebrate Halloween and didn’t want to do anything connected with it. Well, part of that is true; I choose to not celebrate Halloween because of the evil connotations connected with it and wasn’t interested in building a skull for anyone’s house.

 

But, Cathy and I had been dialoging the previous months about how we could create places of grace where unconvinced people can come to know and wholeheartedly follow Jesus Christ. This includes those who walk with Him as well as those who haven’t yet met Him, so that each may know the hope of the calling of Jesus Christ for their lives.

 

So I sent a reply asking for more information before I said no and agreed to stop by their office to look at the plans and set up a time to do so.

 

At the meeting, it was discussed that they wanted the skull to be on the front of the house and around twelve feet high! The skull was going to be installed on the side of a massive pirate ship that covered the whole front of the client’s house. The mouth of the skull would be the gang plank through which people would walk to get their candy; which I was told were expensive candy bars, not some cheap candy.

 

I told them I would think about it, but really I knew my answer; “No, I wasn’t interested in building a twelve foot high skull on the front of anyone’s house” because I had principles I had to stick to even if they were willing to pay me what I had asked (which they were and did), or so I thought in my self-righteous mind.

 

Still, it was one thing to talk about “creating places of grace where unconvinced people can come to know and wholeheartedly follow Jesus Christ” in theory, and another thing to actually do it!  

 

So I set out to ponder what I would do. “Ponder” is what one does when they really don’t want to pray about something because they think that God may have other plans; which in this case He did. “Ponder” is what we super spiritual people say rather than be really honest and say that we are arguing with God.

 

I met with the homeowners to hear why they wanted the twelve foot high skull built and ended up building the skull and got paid, so it wasn’t all bad! And it gave me a chance to use my skills to build a sculpture which I could never tell anyone who were super spiritual like me that I had made it. Oh, wait: I just may have!

 

Then the assignment took another turn; the homeowners (and my former boss) invited my wife Cathy and me to attend a Halloween costume party at the same house on which I had made and installed the skull.

 

I was so sure that Cathy would say that we couldn’t go because;

• It was a Halloween party
• We would have to dress up

 

Cathy responded that she thought that it would be good for us to go and proceeded to discuss some ideas for what we could wear. This whole reaching out to people stuff messes with my theology because it went against what I had learned in Bible school. I still wanted to argue with God.

 

We ended up going dressed as cowboys to a party at which everyone else was dressed as pirates. And, we had a good time eating great food as I was introduced as the artist who made the skull.

 

I even got a chance to spend time interacting with some former clients of mine as they asked me what I had been doing since I had left the company; which is kind of an open door because I had gone back into fulltime ministry.

 

Afterwards, we went home full from the food, the complements for how the skull looked, and from conversations with my former clients who let Cathy and I know that they missed working with me.

 

We had gone to the Halloween party looking for ways to reach out, but it was I who was cared for. My heart had been ministered to by former clients who told stories to Cathy how much they appreciated how well I had taken care of them all of the years that I had worked for my former boss. 

 

Sometimes we miss the best things when we argue with God.