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Faith 101: What to do when God says "Buy a banana hammock"

by James Barringer  
5/01/2010 / Christian Living


I want you to imagine for a moment that you're a prophet.

You're chilling out, minding your own business one day, when all of a sudden God shows up and says, "Buy a banana hammock." "Excuse me?" you reply, sure that you must have heard him wrong. "Go buy a banana hammock," he repeats, "and walk to this town 200 miles away and bury it."

Just like that, he's gone. No explanation, no nothing. What else are you going to do? You go buy a banana hammock and set off on your walk. If you're from Orlando, 200 miles will get you basically to Miami. If you're from Dallas or Fort Worth, go 200 miles north and you'll be in Oklahoma City. You spend about two weeks walking there, bury your underwear, and spend two weeks walking back, all the while waiting for God to show up and explain himself. He never does.

Finally he reappears, several months later. "Hey hey! Remember that banana hammock I had you bury?" "I've been trying to forget about it, honestly, but yeah, I remember." "Go dig it up," he says. So off you go, walking two more weeks to the place where you left it, and digging it up. Of course it's rotted. Four months in the ground will do that to a pair of underwear. There you sit on the ground, baffled beyond belief, while God somewhere chuckles to himself.

Believe it or not, this is a true story, taken from Jeremiah 13. Only one thing has been changed, which is that God actually had Jeremiah buy a loin cloth, presumably because banana hammocks didn't exist yet. If they had, I think we all know what God would have done - he never passes up a chance to make a statement.

In the end, God does appear and explain to Jeremiah what the whole thing is about, which you can read for yourself if you're curious. What I really want to focus on is Jeremiah's faith during the whole process. I think we can identify with him in this story because we spend most of our lives in that situation. We run around, doing whatever we think God wants us to do, and most of the time we're totally baffled.

Have you ever noticed how God's plan only makes sense in retrospect, and almost never while we're in the middle of it? I could point to Jesus' disciples, who kept trying to talk him out of his death, not understanding what it was really about. The same is true in our human relationships, as well. When we were children and our parents were trying to discipline us, we didn't understand why we couldn't have ever toy we wanted at the toy store. It wasn't until later that we understood things like budgets and self-control, things which matter a lot more in the long run than whether or not we have another toy to play with.

This annoys us. We as humans like to know what's going on. We like being in control. When we discover that we actually have very little power in life, that God is in control and he's not telling us what's going on, we tend to get really peeved. In short, we want God to make sense to us.

But that's the thing - eventually he will make sense to us. He just doesn't right now. Jeremiah did, in the end, find out exactly what God was up to, and so did Jesus' disciples after the resurrection. Faith 101, then, is to look at a situation that seems uncertain, and act as if it were certain. Jeremiah had absolutely no clue what God was doing, but he trusted that God did, and acted with strength and courage. That, you see, is faith. He acted as if God made sense, long before God ever made sense.

See, we know exactly what we're supposed to do in life. We know we're supposed to be loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, and so on. It's just that, when things turn difficult, we keep coming up with reasons why we're not going to be those things. Faith puts a stop to that, by resting in the truth that God knows what he is doing. That knowledge gives us the courage to do whatever he says to do, no matter the external circumstances.

Jeremiah spent weeks on the road and months in limbo before he ever understood what God was up to. We're much the same way. A lot of the time we don't have any clue what God is up to. But when we look back on our lives, we know he has been in control the whole time, and we must conclude that he is in control this time. If we had known in the past how he was going to take our pain and use it for good, maybe we would have been a lot more courageous.

But here and now, today, we know that God is going to take our pain and use it for good - we just don't know how. Faith demands that we have courage anyway, the same courage we'd have if we knew exactly what God was up to. We trust him for good before the good actually arrives. We believe him when he promises us that he's for us and that he'll never leave us nor forsake us. Then we live with courage, with faith, making the same choices in our uncertainty that we would make if we knew exactly what God was doing. Like Jeremiah, we act as if he makes sense, even when it seems like he doesn't, because we know that he will eventually. We act as if his way is best for us, even when it seems like it's not, because we know that in some way we don't see yet, it always is and always has been best.

Have you ever wanted to have faith like the Biblical heroes had, like Jeremiah had? It doesn't take a special person. You can do it today. When circumstances get hard and you face a situation where it would be easier to worry or to hate someone or to hold a grudge or to not forgive, keep reminding yourself that God's way is always best, that his plan is always good. This is tremendously liberating. It frees you from second-guessing God, from figuring out how you should respond to difficult situations. You just do what you know you're supposed to do, and let God handle the details. It looks uncertain now, but doing the right thing when it looks uncertain is what faith is all about.

It's interesting to note that we won't be able to have faith in heaven. When we're all resurrected in our glorified bodies, living in the new earth, Paul says, "our faith will be our eyes." There will be no more uncertainty, which means that we will never be able to trust God through uncertainty. If we don't have faith here on earth, the chance will be eternally lost to us. I don't know about you, but I don't want to spend an eternity regretting that I didn't trust God more. Every moment is a new chance to start having faith. Seize this moment - "as long as it is called today," Hebrews writes - and start living boldly in faith.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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