Too good to be true...

You know the phrase. You’ve probably heard it when optimistically telling your friends about some new free deal you discovered online. “Dude, all you have to do is sign up for this website and they send you a free X-box 360 and three i-phones in the mail!” Pills promise weight loss while subsisting entirely on a diet of Filet Mignon and Biscuits with gravy. Websites promise to make you rich with a couple of hours of work a week taking surveys. We are inundated by it from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, and when our hairbrained schemes fail to deliver as the bright-eyed testimonies promised, we instinctively fall back to our parents’ parents’ wisdom. If it sounds to good to be true, you can rest assured…it is.
Some of us, of course are slower learners than others. I’d put myself at the slower end of the percentile. You see I was in college and still placing my hope in things that would not deliver. It was a warm spring day that I met the smooth talking salesmen who spoke dollar signs into my youthful ears. He presented this fully functional business model that involved me simply convincing other people to buy into the model and them convincing others to buy into it under them. I remember clearly him saying something along the lines of “this is not a pyramid scheme, it’s a legitimate business opportunity.” Lets see, I convince people to sell under me and they do the same to people under them. If we draw this out in graphical form, I have to admit to my present self that it roughly creates the shape of a triangle, or pyramid if you’d rather. Sometimes I want to go back and hang out with past me and show him the business end of my backhand. But past me had the world ahead of him, and according to this salesman, I could graduate from Tech and immediately retire. Retire from what, I’m not exactly certain, but that is beside the point. I was going to be independently wealthy and spend my days either saving Africans from disease or snow skiing out of my Chalet in Aspen. I paid my money up front and got my sweet “starter kit” in the mail consisting of various types of nameless, logo-less toiletries that looked like something thrown together in a seedy meth lab. I thought these products would sell themselves! And here I sit five years later, writing in my blog from the comfort of my yacht with its satellite wireless internet connectivity somewhere just off the cost of St. Martin, sipping on a Pina Colada, and telling all of you people, Pyramid schemes work! Oh if only…

Everyone, at one point or another has a similar experience to which they can relate. I am here accusing the world off being a cruel teacher, its lesson sometimes slow in the learning but merciless in its retribution: Don’t trust to hope, unless you love being letdown. I’m reminded of a promotional poster for New Zealand on the show Flight of the Conchords. “New Zealand: Don’t expect too much, you will love it.” Don’t we all share that sentiment, maybe not about New Zealand, but about everything else?

There’s a problem though. You see, I claim to believe in a God who would send his son to die in order to save me from my own shortcomings. I claim this God loves me and everyone in the world despite the innumerable times each one of us has forsaken his will for our own aims. A God who will forgive me for doing wrong not one time, or seven times, but seventy times seven times, and more if I go over that quota. I assert that I believe that the Bible is a true revelation of who God is and how he works in this world. And if you read the Bible to find God’s character, you’ll read a story of a people who constantly fail, and do it with such creative and epic flair that any idiot would think they were beyond redemption. At least any idiot who knows that things are always too good to be true. What’s more, this same Bible not only shows a God that will send his son and allow those he’s trying to save to do the killing, it also says that this God wants to give his people things. Wants to restore goodness to the world. It says there’s still echoes of Eden in this world, echoes of how things were meant to be, and God wants those echoes to resound in our lives.

That means I have a little re-learning to do. It sounds too good to be true that there would be a God who would work through our painful shortcomings to redeem the world, yet I say it is true. Irrevocably true. That means these good things in my life that I think I don’t deserve. These things that, deep down inside I suspect are just more set-ups for lessons about life’s cruelty, are in fact revelations of the best things God has to offer. I have to learn that a God who loves me will necessarily also want the best for me, want me to be joyful. Do I mean he’ll give me everything I want? Not exactly. I should rather say he’ll give me everything I truly want, which includes some things I don’t know I want and excludes others that I think I do. It could be stated like this: with respects to God and his creation, the wisdom should be if it seems too good to be true, there is hope that its actually too good not to be. Everything with God is absolutely good, good at its best, and as it turns out everything of God is also absolutely true. Truth at its truest. If you do the math here, you get the formula: that which is best in this world is also truest.

Consequently, when I find myself doubting that God really wants to give me good things I have to remind myself to trust him. Or when I find myself feeling beyond redemption, I have to remind myself to trust him. God proved with Christ that nothing is too bad to be good, and things aren’t too good to be true, sometimes, they’re too good not to be.