Square-Wheeled Trains & Flightless Planes: God’s Love for the Despised
by Sam Bowman
In 2008, any self-respecting elementary school kid like myself had a presentable hoard of Bionicle. It was only right. Lego’s response to the action figure craze gave me access to copious buildable heroes and innumerable hours of fun. There was only one issue.
The green ones. Those godforsaken green ones.
For reasons I don’t really understand, the green plastic Lego used to produce Bionicle figures was defective. It was notoriously brittle. It would snap right as it attached to the other Lego pieces. Not the blue ones. Not the red ones. The green ones. Tragedy for a preteen.
There wasn’t much use for those pieces after they snapped. All that was left to do was to give them a Viking burial and buy the slightly less cooler blue Bionicle.
It’s easy to feel like that broken green action figure in the eyes of the world around us.
Useless. Disposable. Foolish. And in a lot of ways, that’s not out of the ordinary for the Christian. We’re told that in this world, we will have trouble (John 16:33). We know that sin’s consequences impact daily life under the sun (Romans 8:22). We worship a stumbling block to the nations (1 Corinthians 1:23).
So what do we do when we feel like a misfit toy? We remember that Christ sees things differently than man does (Isaiah 55:8-9). And He doesn’t see value the way the world sees value.
Want evidence of that? Well, judging by the Mariah Carey music I hear over your shoulder, you picked a great time of year to ask. As I write this, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas- when we celebrate our King coming to earth to triumphantly defeat sin and death. But oftentimes, it’s easy to forget how He didn’t come. He didn’t choose to come as a conqueror on a white horse. That day will come later. At Bethlehem, Christ came as a humble baby, welcomed by destitute parents, political turbulence, and more than the average amount of cows usually involved in labor. How useless, the world around Him said. How foolish.
How beautiful. Christ’s coming shows His humility, absolutely- but it also shows His desire to use what Paul calls in 1 Corinthians 1 “what is foolish in the world” to bring Himself glory. No man will get credit for the goodness and mercy of God. In His providence, He’s willing to use anyone and anything to show a broken and dying world His own kindness. Our response to God’s grand plan of redemption could never be “Welp! Makes sense. I would have done it the same way.” Instead, we can only say with Paul in Romans 11, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!”
Take heart, saint. Christ loves the weak and despised. Even more than that, it gives Him joy to glorify Himself in you. The world and its desires can’t define you. Jesus Himself is the only
one that can. Go and live in that freedom, friend- even if you feel like a square-wheeled train or a flightless plane or a recently compromised bright green Bionicle. Find peace in the truth that because of Christ’s work, God intends to love you as His own- and to use your life as a testament to His own wisdom.