Laughing at God

Regina Spektor recently released a CD with a song entitled, Laughing With.

Here’s a snippet of the lyrics:

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God when they’re starving or freezing or so very poor

No one laughs at God when the doctor calls after some routine tests
No one’s laughing at God when it’s gotten real late and their kid’s not back from that party yet

No one laughs at God when their airplane starts to uncontrollably shake
No one’s laughing at God when they see the one they love hand in hand with someone else and they hope that they’re mistaken
No one laughs at God when the cops knock on their door and they say “We’ve got some bad new, sir,”
No one’s laughing at God when there’s a famine, fire or flood

But God can be funny
At a cocktail party while listening to a good God-themed joke or
Or when the crazies say he hates us and they get so red in the head you think that they’re about to choke

God can be funny
When told he’ll give you money if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie
Who does magic like Houdini
Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus

God can be so hilarious
Ha ha
Ha ha

On Sunday, I could not get this song out of my head. Sunday was a rough day in the life of the church. My version of Regina’s song would go something like this: No one laughs at God when you learn that a lady has lost 14 of her 15 siblings, three in the past year. No one laughs when the lady who has battled cancer longer than I have been alive is in a car accident on the way to church, breaking her foot. No one laughs when you hear a father recount the messy divorce settlement his daughter is enduring. No one laughs when you see generations in a family suffer from divorce or alcoholism. No one laughs when you see two young children without a father because he made one bad decision and now finds himself in prison for a long time.

Then there’s the other side to the song. When we laugh at God. I saw this later that evening when I was attending a church gathering at a different church with a much, much younger demographic represented. Here’s my verse: God can be funny, at a church barbecue, while drinking a Pabst or a Fat Tire. God can be funny when cracking a joke about a mega-church pastor’s really white and cheesy smile or his greased back hair or his church that at one time was a basketball arena. God can be funny when making jokes about people in the bible.

God can be funny here and not there. Life is not fair. Of this I am quite certain.

~ by firescloudsandwanderings on July 2, 2009.