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There’s a saying, “you can’t put watermelon ideas in a pea brain.” I like it because it speaks to the size of God versus the size of our own ability to comprehend and understand. We simply can’t know and understand everything about the world around or us, or about God Himself.

Sometimes when kids are teen agers they can drive their parents nuts because they know everything, they think they have all the answers. It can make the rest of us who have been on the planet much longer, a bit crazy. Also, worried, concerned. There’s another saying, “those of you who think you know everything, annoy the heck out of those of us who do.”

Usually we grow out of our know-it-all-phase, although there is often a piece of that that remains behind. Humility, a bit of intellectual surrender, does not always come so easy to us as people. Arrogance, hubris, believing ourselves to have all the answers and to be right, that seems to come pretty naturally to most of us.

The internet is a great venue for people who have all the answers. There can be some frolicking discussions about religion, politics, even marriage. Big thoughts, lots and lots of watermelons ideas from the pea brains. (There goes half  my readership now mortally offended because I’ve called us all pea brains.)

We are pea brains, as in we don’t always know what we think we know, and some concepts are too big for our brains to process. That’s okay, welcome to the human race. The problem being that like teen agers we can cause ourself unnecessary angst by chasing rabbits down holes and believing we know it all. I sometimes say when we find that rabbit, we’re prepared to bludgeon him to death with the truth as we know it. If we’re truly seeking the truth however, we have to surrender some of our intellect, to let go of what we think we know. In order to learn anything, we have to make room for the new. When we think we know everything, we become totally unteachable.

A couple of discussions yesterday about pre-destination, pre-determinism sparked my dark humor. If you have some understanding of physics, of the nature of time and space, of the vastness of God, then the idea that He may know who we are and what our decisions are going to be before we know, is entirely within the realm of possibility. We however, are called to live in the present, in His presence, as I sometimes say.

Someone smart once explained it as we have freewill, like a fish has freewill in an aquarium. We are free to swim among the coral or the bubbler, but there are still aquarium walls, transparent so we can’t always see them, but they are there. That’s called putting a watermelon idea in a pea brain. It’s a paradox which often strains our brains, and time is no longer a linear concept in the way we perceive it as people.

What sparked my dark humor was how strident, how unyielding some of the predestination ones were being, so while strongly advocating for the total sovereignty of God, ironically they were quite prepared to begin revoking people’s salvation themselves and declaring them to not be members of the elect.

There’s an irony to people’s logic (or lack thereof) that often makes me laugh, and it all boils down to one root issue,  God is God and you are not.

cheshire