Sometimes They're Not!

Sometimes things are exactly as they seem. Those are the easy times wherein you need no wisdom or discernment to reach a conclusion based on the evidence at hand. If it’s freezing outside, and someone’s sitting on a street corner barefoot, chances are they either can’t afford a pair of shoes, or they got robbed of their shoes, but whether the former or the latter, they need shoes!

Other times, however, things are not as they seem. I remember a story I heard of an over eager faith healer, who took a situation at face value, and ended up with egg all over his face. 

As the story goes, there was a line of individuals waiting to get prayed for by this particular faith healer, and as a middle aged woman stepped up to be prayed for, the faith healer thundered “I know the Lord will heal your skin cancer this very day sister. I know it as sure as I am standing here.”

The woman took a sharp breath, and said, “What skin cancer? Do you know something I don’t?”

“That, on your face”, the faith healer said.

The woman felt around her face until she happened upon the thing the faith healer was pointing at. She pinched it, removed it from her face, and promptly popped it into her mouth.

“Oh, that? That’s a raisin my daughter stuck to my face. I need prayer for my arthritis.”

Then there are those special times when what you hear is so ludicrous, so out of place, so improbable, that you just have to call it out, even at the risk of being labeled a hater, a doubter, someone who doesn’t believe victims, or some other trope they are yet to invent to pressure people into not voicing dissent no matter how far-fetched what they hear is.

If I were to tell you that I was walking through Dallas Texas, and I got assaulted by two pale, thin men wearing bicycle shorts and Male Feminist T-shirts, yelling ‘fat, fat, fatty’ at me, and telling me that this was Vegan Country after hanging a pork sausage around my neck, you’d have a right to be skeptical. Too many variables in that story don’t make sense. Too many things seem out of place.

Yet, something just as improbable was said to have happened in Chicago a couple weeks ago, and nobody ever questioned it, or pointed out the holes and inconsistencies in the story that made it look like a half-eaten slice of Swiss cheese.

We all went along with it, a chorus of sympathetic souls, not allowing for the very real possibility that some individuals are so eager to claim victimhood they are willing to stage a hate crime in order to do so.

We seem to have forgotten that we were exhorted to test all things, as we’ve seemingly forgotten so many of the other warnings peppered throughout the Bible. Because of our forgetfulness we do thing we ought not to do, we do not do things we ought to do, then sit on the sidelines, deflated and disillusioned wondering why there is no forward momentum.

These are just a few thoughts after a handful of sleepless nights due to two kids with the flu.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.