COMING SOON: 
Absurdus: (Latin) ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, having no rational or orderly relationship to known rules of human life.
Christianity is taking a giant stride into the absurd. Remove from Christianity its ability to shock and it is altogether destroyed. It becomes a tiny superficial thing, capable neither of inflicting deep wounds nor of healing them. It’s when the absurd starts to sound reasonable that we should begin to worry. Soren Kierkegaard
COFFEE
Look for God.
Look for God like a man
with his head on fire looks for water.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Imagine God invites you out for a cup of coffee. You go to the coffee shop and sit down. It’s a nice coffee shop where they have servers and spell it Shoppe.
The waitress takes your order. You have yours with cream. God orders it black but with three sugars.
You sip on you coffee, then get up the courage to speak, “Can I ask you something?”
“Anything,” God replies.
“About the Bible…”
“Yes?”
“Is it Your Word, or not?”
“What do you mean?” God asks.
“Well, did you write it or did people?”
“Yes,” God replies.
You are unsure whether God said, “Yes.” or “Yes?” wanting you to say more, so you add, “You know, did you write the book or did people just guess at what you would write?”
“So, you think the Bible is a book?” God asks.
“Isn’t it?” you say.
“Is it?” God asks.
You sit silently.
“A lot of people think so,” God says. “Maybe it is a book, maybe it’s many books. Maybe I wrote it. Maybe people, lots of people, wrote it. Maybe it’s both. Maybe…” God goes on with a continuous list of maybes that you can’t follow. Then God asks, “What do you think?”
“What do I think?” you say. “I want to know what you think.”
“Do you think I think?” God asks.
“Don’t you?”
“Do I?”
“I think so,” you say.
God sips coffee and looks out the window. You look and see a bird. You watch as it falls to the ground, lifeless.
“Ahhh!” you sputter.
“You know how the saying goes,” God replies, “not a sparrow falls from the sky…”
You go back to your coffee. Not sure if you should look at God or not.
God takes another sip. “Mmmmm, that is good!” God declares returning the cup to the table. “So, you want to know what the Bible is?”
“Yes,” you say resting your cup, “but what I really want to know about is You.”
“Come, and I’ll show you.”
God rises and moves toward the door.
You follow, then realize that God is walking out without paying the tab. God is going to stiff the Shoppe. You pull out money and leave it on the table, enough for the coffees and the tip.
Hurrying after God, you keep thinking, ‘I can’t believe God was going to just walk out without paying for the coffee. Did God want me to pay? God invited me. What kind of universe is this where the creator can walk out of a restaurant without paying, or invite someone and then leave them with the tab?”
You hear God whisper, “You think about the stupidest things.”
Looking around, you don’t see God anywhere. Navigating the outside of the building, you spy God in the nearby park behind a tree, but when approaching it, God is gone.
You pause to ponder returning to your car or going back inside the restaurant to get a bagel, then you hear God whisper, “So, are you going to look for me, or not?”
(Look for Absurdus in March 2019)
