"I like your shirt. Are you a med student?" The man was probably in his mid-thirties, a bit overweight, a good ole boy in a baseball cap behind me at Food Lion. I frequently get comments from strangers on my t-shirts. This one featured the human skeleton on a black background, each of the bones labeled with their scientific name.
"No, I just like the shirt." A lot of people have a hard time with the fact that I wear shirts because I like them, not because I have any particular association with the stuff pictured. For instance, I do not own a Harley Davidson motorcycle, nor do I particularly like them, but I do own a Harley Davidson shirt because I like the Harley Davidson shirt. However, in the case of the bone shirt, I do own my very own skeleton, so I suppose I'm as qualified as any.
"Oh. I was in a car wreck not too long ago, so I've really been reading up on the human body."
"Oh, uh, well, I'm sorry about your accident. The human body is neat, though." I'm such a conversational idiot sometimes.
"Jesus is going to heal me." Bam! Conversation killer!
"Um. That's good." I love the South, but it seems like you can't do anything without encountering a would-be missionary. I admire their devotion, but I rarely agree with their views or the way they handle them. And sometimes, man, you just wanna go to the store. It was at this point that I started wishing that the cashier would hurry up and ring me out. I just wanted a soda, I didn't want to be witnessed to, and certainly not by someone who appeared to have a very different view of God than I do. Honestly? Part of me wanted to stay and argue with him, but this was some poor old guy who had some health problems. He did not need some smart-aleck non-med student with a super-cool shirt picking at his faith.
But his kind of faith bothers me. It's not faith at all, it's bargaining. It's saying to God, "Hey, I'll believe in you, but you gotta do what I want." I wanted to ask him, "What if He doesn't heal you? Will you turn away?" Maybe his logic is that God loves him and so will do the best thing for him. But I kinda see it as God will do the best thing for everybody as a collective whole, and the best thing for everybody requires that some people not get healed sometimes, that bad things happen to nice men who pay compliments to strangers in grocery stores. God has a plan for you, but it is impossible to separate it out from His plan for everybody and everything. It is all interconnected.
And who knows whether healing really would be the best thing for this guy? Maybe his relationships with his friends and family will improve and his life will take on new meaning just because he is not healed. We are all like little kids. We want the candy bar, we know it will taste good, and we think that if our mother loves us, she will want to do the best thing for us and give us the candy bar. But Mother has additional knowledge that tells her that the candy bar is really not the best thing for us. Simply put, God has additional knowledge - like all of it. So, Mr. Man at the Food Lion, if you trust this God to heal you, do you trust Him enough to know whether or not He should?
I saw a fortune cookie a while back that said, "The only thing we know about future developments is that they will develop." All discussion aside as to whether that is in fact the absolute worst fortune cookie message ever or not, the Food Lion guy reminded me of it. We do not know the details about God's plan. It is not on display at City Hall nor in a monastery somewhere being updated constantly by a monk with very tiny handwriting. I doubt we can ever truly know God's plan, even after it happens, because we can never have all the additional knowledge. The only thing we know about the divine plan is that it's going to happen. So we have no choice in what happens, regardless of whether we even accept that or not, but we can experience it and examine it and enjoy it with the belief that there is a point, that Someone who knows what's going on is pulling the strings. That is faith.
And all this from a stupid t-shirt.
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