How to Trust God when Life Feels Cruel (and you feel like a fool)

As a young child, I took April Fool’s Day very seriously. Despite having a strict 9pm bedtime, I would set my alarm clock for midnight so I had the opportunity to wake up after the whole household was asleep and set up my many pranks. Every year, I plotted. I schemed up the most creative, unexpected pranks to fool my family. One year, I dressed my brother’s stuffed animals in my doll clothes and replaced them next to him as he slept. Another year, I put a schmear of cream cheese atop my mom’s deodorant and made my dad a strong “cup of coffee,” which consisted solely of water and vanilla extract. At one point, I even printed out dozens of faces of Nicolas Cage to place in obscure spots around the house. My dad was finding them for months. As I grew up and moved out, I had fewer pranks in my repertoire and less interest in playing them. Instead, I grew more aware of the cruel pranks that some people liked to play via social media, such as fake pregnancies and cancer scares. Suddenly, pranks didn’t feel so fun anymore. 

Unlike the pranks by the great Prank Sinatra (aka Winston Bishop aka Winnie the Bish aka aka aka Brown Lightning), which are always way too big or way too small, sometimes we start to feel like life is playing one big prank on us. 

 

Am I Being Pranked Right Now?

Have you ever had a moment like this? A moment when you looked around in disbelief, waiting for the guys from Punk’d to jump out from behind the bushes and reveal their evil scheme? Where does this feeling come from? Similar to the absurdity that is highlighted in stories like The Series of Unfortunate Events, sometimes life feels just as bizarre. As we grow up, we learn to make sense of the world around us. We observe cause-and-effect relationships and notice some of the natural consequences of certain actions. We find the logical progressions and the natural order of things, and we start to gain our footing. 

The Promise of a Wise Life

Though nothing in life is promised, common sense tells us that there are some things we can count on:

If you drive safely and follow traffic laws, you’ll be unlikely to get in a car accident or end up in jail.

If you eat healthy, you will be unlikely to deal with sickness and disease. 

If you manage your money wisely, you will be unlikely to go into debt or end up in financial ruin.

If you obey God’s law, you will be unlikely to encounter the consequences of wickedness.  

I could go on and on. We each have statements like this that become ingrained in our hearts and minds as near-promises. We rely on them. We live our lives counting on the assurance and security they provide.

When the Other Shoe Drops

When life doesn’t follow the rules, it can blindside you. It feels like a betrayal, a violation, or maybe even a prank. You look around dumbfounded. “What happened? This has always worked before. This was supposed to work.”

Suddenly, the world feels cruel. Sometimes, you may feel embarrassed or ashamed. “I should have seen this coming. How could I be so naive?” Some people feel anger and offense rise within them at the injustice of an unpredictable world. Others wonder if everyone else knew but them. Some wonder if God is laughing or mocking them for being so foolish or if He actually cares. 

But as a former professor of mine used to say, “Life comes for us all.” None of us can escape this moment—the day when everything possible goes wrong, the month where you just can’t catch a break, the year when you went through more than a human should ever have to endure. Suffering doesn’t make sense. It shatters our capacity to find meaning. And sometimes, we feel like a fool for having tried to live a sensical life in such a chaotic, unruly, and uncaring world. 

Our Self-Protective Strategies

When we feel that we’ve been made a “fool,” we act like an armadillo, instantly hiding behind our outer armor and protecting ourselves. No one wants to feel like they’ve been fooled. It’s vulnerable. It triggers our insecurities and heightens our fears. 

Though we all have defenses we put up to protect ourselves, we each do it a little differently. Some people grow cynical, vowing to always expect the worst so they’ll never be blindsided again. Others isolate themselves, whether through physical distance, emotional detachment, one-sided reciprocity, or an overall relational shallowness. It’s harder to get hurt when you’ve not truly been vulnerable or trusted the people around you. Still, others protect themselves by striving to regain a sense of security and control. They make their lives either very well-ordered, or busy, or both–to minimize all variables that make them feel powerless. Some identify as control-freaks or clean-freaks and go into a cleaning frenzy when they’re stressed. Some become workaholics to avoid feeling their emotions. But others have subtler ways of regaining control that may not look as put together, but feel equally compulsive when life gets chaotic. 

How our Self-Protection Becomes Self-Sabotage 

The problem with our self-protective strategies is that they try to solve a real problem with an underdeveloped solution. They are impulsive reactions, fearful reflexes, and ultimately very feeble attempts to make us feel better without dealing with the root issue.

Think about it. Betty has a good group of friends. Then, the unthinkable happens. Her friend dies in a freak accident that no one could have predicted. She feels like the rug has been pulled from under her. Over time, she learns how to go on and develop other friendships. But she holds them all at arm’s length, vowing that she’ll never have to feel that kind of pain again. But in the process, she is causing herself pain because in the absence of her best friend, she is no longer allowing herself to build meaningful relationships, and the loneliness leads her to a range of other unhealthy coping mechanisms which ultimately sabotage her own hopes and dreams and goals. This keeps her stuck in either pain or the process of numbing pain, rather than pursuing true health and wholeness and healing so she can thrive. 

Do you see how her self-protective strategy was somewhat of a half-thought-out solution? It didn’t really solve the problem. Instead, it prolonged the problem. We all do this in our own ways, sometimes daily. What is your self-protective strategy? What health, healing, or wholeness is it keeping you from?

What’s a Fool to Do?

Just like we cling to logical near-promises to make the world make sense, we also make vows with ourselves when it doesn’t. We make commitments that we never want to feel like that again, we never want to put ourselves in a position like that again, we never want to look like a “fool” again. So we make vows that we cannot and should not keep. 

A vow as simple as, “I will never feel that powerless again” can make a person do crazy things. 

Any comic book lover knows that a vow like this could easily be a villain origin story.

When you ask the average person what they want in life, they share hopes and dreams and ambitions. But when you look at their actions, something doesn’t line up. They have lofty goals, but cautious steps. They have big dreams, but they are too scared to do the simple achievable next step in front of them because they never want to feel out-of-control. So, they’d rather mitigate success than feel like a failure on the way there. 

Or, on the other hand, sometimes they do crazy impulsive things for the rush of it. They jump the gun and take big risks rather than taking the slow and steady route. Taking it one step at a time feels scary and unsure, but at least with one grand gesture or risky investment, they can see instant results and not have to deal with the doubts and insecurities that get triggered by the vulnerable process of waiting and hoping. 

In a way, we all try to avoid the feeling of being “fooled” by taking actions that…make us into a fool. 

When the Foolish One Meets the Faithful One

Everybody brace yourselves: God never promises that this life will be free from suffering, instability, danger, pain, or loss. What He does promise is that He will be with us.

We can talk all we want about this cruel world, as if we don’t contribute to it. But what we often don’t see when we are feeling our own entitlement to a pain-free life is that in our own attempts to avoid pain, we so often cast ourselves right into it. We inflict further wounds onto ourselves, with our Gracious Father standing next to us, pleading with us to be still and let Him tend to us. Instead, we cast angry accusations His way, questioning why He doesn’t care about us, and flailing our bloodied limbs further into the thorny thicket. 

In the midst of our deep groans of grief and agony, we have a Savior who himself bore a crown of thorns, sitting ready to pull each thistle free. We flail in the presence of a Savior who spilled His own blood so that no matter the root issue of the injustice and destruction we inflict and have inflicted upon us; we can be free. 

The Fool, Jesus

If anyone was made to look a fool, it was Jesus. The King of all Kings, wearing a crown of thorns. The Lord of all Lords, with teenage soldiers mocking him in his underwear. The God of the Universe, hungry and thirsty and weak with a powerless Adversary, making empty promises of pointless power in a barren desert (Matt. 4:1-11). The man who had nowhere to lay his head. This was the man that Isaiah 53 describes with language like, 

“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,

    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by mankind,

    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.

Like one from whom people hide their faces

    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. (v.2-3)

 

It later goes on to say that: 

“He took up our pain…yet we considered him punished by God” (v.4)

“He was led like a lamb to the slaughter and…he did not open his mouth.” (v.7)

“He was assigned a grave with the wicked…though he had done no violence” (v.9).

If anyone has the right to feel like they were made a fool, wouldn’t it be the Savior who did nothing wrong and yet was treated like the most vile criminal? And yet…and yet…despite the utter wrongness of this world, the utter fact that things were never supposed to feel this cruel and this vile and this painful, we still have a God who (despite our insecure attachment that makes us feel otherwise) never points His finger at us from heaven and laughs condescendingly, but instead, stoops down to our level (Psalm 113:6-7) to raise us up from the ashes and restore us to the health, healing, and wholeness we were robbed of (by other’s sin) and that we sabotaged (through our own sin). 

The Joyful Fools We Are

And thus, we get to tell foolish stories of virgins who gave birth and barren desserts where thousands were fed, and green grass hilltops where “the people were like sheep without a shepherd” (Mark 6:34) and yet the baskets of food never ran out. Because our Savior became a fool for us, we get to be like David (the shepherd turned king) and joyfully become a fool for Him: “​​I was dancing before the LORD…He appointed me as the leader of Israel, the people of the LORD, so I celebrate before the LORD. Yes, and I am willing to look even more foolish than this, even to be humiliated in my own eyes!” (2 Samuel 6:21-22a, NLT)

What a beautiful twist in this story, right? Despite the cruel world we live in, we have every reason to celebrate like fools because of this profound (and surprisingly sheep/shepherd-laden) truth:

“We all, like sheep, have gone astray,

each of us has turned to our own way;

and the Lord has laid on him

the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6)

The April Fool’s Prank That Changed History

As I’ve talked with friends and loved ones, I’ve heard a resounding chorus of people feeling like this year has already been so heavy. People are exhausted from unexpected plot twists they couldn’t have seen coming. They are bombarded by fear-driven news cycles and out-of-control current events that feel unstable. They have faced loss after loss, overwhelming their ability to process and making them feel like they can’t take a breath.

Even I felt this way in the first few months of the year. For whatever reason, it seemed like it was just one thing after another, and I repeatedly vented to friends and small groups, “I just can’t catch my breath.” 

So I was surprised when I opened to the old familiar Psalm 23, and saw similar language reflected back to me. 

“God, my shepherd!

    I don’t need a thing.

You have bedded me down in lush meadows,

    you find me quiet pools to drink from.

True to your word,

    you let me catch my breath

    and send me in the right direction.” (v.1-3, MSG)

 

Our Good Shepherd knows what we need. And in a world filled with many dark valleys “of the shadow of death,” He smiled with a twinkle in His eye, and a crazy idea for a prank that would change history. What a scene it would be if He let all the dark powers and rulers and even the Devil himself think they killed Jesus, and then He walked right out of that tomb with some mischievous angel somewhere yelling “PSYCH!!! He fooled you!” (probably)

So, as we enter into the first day of the month of Easter, when we will celebrate all these realities once again, writing this post felt like a better way to celebrate April Fool’s Day than setting my alarm for midnight and cracking out a slab of cream cheese. 

 

Because: 

In a world that strives all its life not to be made a fool…

I will gladly become a fool for Him,

Because He became a fool for me.

Today, on April Fool’s Day, that is the Gospel I preach.