Not what I was expecting

I realize the following is a full of faulty logic, a bit of a stretch, and has nothing to do with Bolivia, but I don’t care because I asked the owner of this blog if I could write whatever I wanted on it and she said I could.

Sometimes life makes it painstakingly clear that our expectations guarantee nothing, and certainty is little more than illusion. I have three cases to the point and there are proven millions (see primary results) who will disagree with me here. But the idea is that each is simply not what I personally would expect.


1. An international vocal star known worldwide for her intensely sensual imagine, the object of many a man’s desire, is repeatedly betrayed and cheated on by the one man who promised before state, god and family to love her.
2. Among the hardest working of all public servants, a woman who devoted her life to law and country, known as a wide-reaching advocate for the rights of children and women and a leader in the US Congress has a tough time getting a job.
3. A prophecy fulfilling miracle worker, preaching love and inclusion, armed with nothing but a new way of living, is crucified before the masses.

Who would cheat on SHAKIRA?
Who wouldn’t give SENATOR CLINTON a job?
And who would kill the GOD OF LOVE?

I’m sorry but Shakira is hot, Clinton is smart and God is good. So what went wrong??
In recent weeks I was mulling over these questions until my Belgium Chocolate friend* told me about the evangelicals on her bus in Colombia.

There’s pretty much two choices for Christians in Latin America: Evangelical or Catholic; the other protestants are few and far between. So I’ve become used to the evangelical “god by numbers” routine, but I also give it little credibility and honestly even find it a bit offensive, just as they might find my description of it. It basically consists of the confession of your sinfulness, acceptance of Jesus as god, acknowledgement of his sacrifice for you, then invitation for him to come on into your heart. Which is all well and good and I would even accept the attitude surrounding the routine that it’s a sort of an instantaneous, magical transformation. Weird stuff happens to me all the time and my own conversion experience wasn’t a far cry from steps one through four above. But what irks me is the attitude that steps one through four are the ONLY way, as if god is ONLY channeled through the above prayer, and also the urgency that is often placed on getting someone to repeat this prayer as if it’s the trump card.

So Senorita Belgium is a little unorthodox, not a Christian and not really religiously active, but interested in the varied possibilities of spirituality and holistic healing. She’s on a bus crossing the Colombian countryside, and I’m not sure how she started to speak with her seat partner, a young Colombian woman, but at some point she did and the conversation turned to God. Apparently the Colombian woman’s travel partners sitting in front of them were listening to the conversation, because as if on cue in the perfect moment they turned around in their seat to pray with my friend. Like I said, I don’t know how the conversation went, I just know that these three women taught her the prayer to repeat and prayed over her as she said the words. Then immediately following “Amen”, the bus stopped at my friend’s destination and she got off leaving the women behind.

I chuckled at the story, awaiting my friend’s comments of how she felt “attacked” and “uncomfortable” by the women, the prayer or the experience. But to my surprise, her first remark was, “I could feel the love of god radiating from these women.” I hushed up my chuckle. What I rudely call “God by Numbers” was a deeply spiritual blessing for my “unreligious” friend. At first I thought, well my friend doesn’t live in America with the baggage of our conservative evangelical movement, and knows little of the various pockets of Christianity and their approaches to living out the gospel, so to her it was just another mystical encounter. But so what if it was? Good for her that she doesn’t walk around with all the preconceptions and prejudices that I have. If she said she felt the love of god, then she felt it. Her prayer partners would argue their method was a success. My bias would argue that the Divine made it through despite their method. But in the end those opinions don’t matter, because contrary to my expectations she was blessed.

Which got me thinking about my disappointments with Shakira and the gang. I find redemption in that if things aren’t always what we hope for, at least sometimes its good to be wrong and things turn out to be better than we expected. I’m hoping I’m wrong more often.


*She’s not made of chocolate, but she is Belgium and almost always has chocolate with her, which she generously offers up in sporadic moments.