Being Unreasonable – Devotion for
One thing that I hated hearing from my parents when I was growing up was “because I said so.” I swore I would not ever say that to my children, but guess what? I say it all the time when they try to argue with me. “Because I said so” is the near perfect way of saying to your child, “Quit arguing – I’m the parent and I’m right and you’re just going to have to live and trust it!” As a teen, I thought that “because I said so” was completely unreasonable, because that really isn’t much of an excuse why I should do something or why I wasn’t allowed to do something. But it was my parents word that won, so I had to abide by it, whether I believed it to be reasonable or not.
John 9 is one of my favorite chapters in the Bible. In this familiar passages, Jesus and his disciples happen upon a blind man, and after a brief discussion as to why the man was blind, Jesus ultimately healed him with some mud made from his spit and dirt. Well, the Pharisees get all worked up because Jesus did this on the Sabbath, and they felt that him healing this man on the Sabbath was a sign that he was not from God. The Pharisees interrogate the former blind man and his parents, simply trying to understand what and why this has happened. The Pharisees ask him a leading question: “Give glory to God; we know that this man is a sinner.” (John 9:24) In their words, they want him to give glory to God by proclaiming that God is the one who healed him, and not this “sinner” named Jesus. The formerly sight-impaired replies, “Whether He is a sinner, I do not know; one thing I do know, that though I was blind.” (John 9:25) What I love about his reply is that he didn’t know how it happened exactly. He couldn’t explain the science of his healing, and he didn’t need to. He didn’t even really know who Jesus was, and he certainly didn’t know whether or not Jesus was a sinner, and to him it didn’t matter. What mattered is one moment he was blind – the next moment because of the touch of Jesus he could see, and he was just fine with not knowing the rest of the who, what, why, when, and where. To him, it was kind of like accepting a “because I said so” thing – he didn’t need to know anything more.
Oh that I would live that way sometimes. Sometimes I get so caught up in why something happens, or why I’m supposed to do this or that. I want a reasonable explanation for everything, and I try to rationalize everything. I have a difficult time accepting “coincidences,” and I try to find a reason for those types of things. Sometimes I just need to quit asking why. Sometimes I need to just acknowledge that I don’t have all the answers and I’m not going to figure it all out. I need to accept that God doesn’t need a reason for everything that He does or allows. I think I need to accept that I can be unreasonable.
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