Daily Edifier: Bend It Like Beckham

Bend It Like Beckham

“And the Angel of the LORD appeared to him [Moses] in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. So he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed.” (Exodus 3:2)

In the 2002 movie Bend It Like Beckham, an Indian girl living in London rebels against her Sikh parents by running off to Germany with a soccer team. While the movie title is a reference to the skills of English soccer star David Beckham who can bend a ball into the goal over the heads of defenders, nobody can bend the facts of life like God. For Winona Ryder, it’s Reality Bites, but for God, it’s reality bends. In the Bible, there are times when God chooses to confound the foolish in order to bend our paradigm of experience.

After 40 years of herding sheep in the Midian desert, Moses had never seen a bush that burned but did not burn up. It got his undivided attention and drew him closer to God to receive his call to lead his people out of Egypt. When Moses got to the Red Sea, he ran out of time, space and options. God had an unexpected solution, the parting of the Red Sea to demonstrate His power and allow the children of Israel to cross over to flee Pharaoh and the Egyptian army. When Jesus asked Peter to catch a fish and get the coin from its mouth to pay their temple taxes instead of Finding Nemo, we can only imagine what Peter must have thought about those fishy instructions.

When Jesus appeared on the water in the middle of the night during a storm, the disciples cried out, “It’s a ghost!” They had never seen a man walk on water and was so scared they couldn’t even call Ghostbusters. This led to the miracle of Peter also walking on the water. Each of these new paradigms was a stepping stone of a close encounter of the God kind so that we could experience God in a new way.

Chubby Checker could only do the twist, but God used these times to twist our carnal minds to show us that His ways are not our ways and He can bend things and move at warp speed if He wants to.Whenever we try to predict that God will kick the ball in a certain direction, He bends the ball to keep us from becoming our own gods. Many of us have been guilty of judging someone for an experience they’ve had that we’ve never had, and even dismiss it as extreme or not from God.

God can outbend David Beckham, and He is in the business of bending our paradigm from no personal experiences to God experiences. But if we operate only by logic and reason and not by faith, we may never have the privilege of having the God experiences. We don’t have to bend it like Beckham, but we can keep our hearts open and build our faith with the Word of God to experience new paradigms. That’s the way the ball bounces, that’s the way the earth spins, and that’s the way a Mercedes Benz.

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