Band-Aids, Bellybuttons and Why?

After the  Wimbledon debacle in the minivan, we decided we needed a bit of advice. We called our pediatrician and explained the situation in whatever detail you can explain projectile vomiting to a professional, and we asked her what we should do differently. Her answer was a bandaid……Over the bellybutton….

We did ask for a mechanism of action. She said something about pressure points and not knowing exactly why. But what I did know was that she'd gone to school for a very long time to be able to say things like that with a straight face, and I hadn't.

So we tried it. Up at 5 AM, three and a half hours in the car, and not once did we need the four barf bucket in each kid's seats for exactly that purpose. I still don't know why a bandaid over a bellybutton does anything at all. I just know it worked, and that I was not the one in the room qualified to argue with the woman who told me to do it.

Now  I'm not saying you shouldn't ever question your doctor. There's a time and a place for that, and plenty of good reasons to ask for the "why" behind a recommendation, get a second opinion, push back when something doesn't sit right. Doctors are people. They're wrong sometimes. That's not the point I'm making.

The point is that I trusted a woman with a medical degree on a matter of bellybuttons and bandaids, no explanation required, because the gap between her expertise and mine was obvious.

And if that's how I treat a pediatrician, a good one honestly one of the best we have ever found, but a created, fallible, human being. 

 I have some nerve treating the actual Creator of the universe like He owes me a mechanism before I'll comply.

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9).

That's not a poetic sentence. That's a statement of fact.

Not "God is smarter than you, so defer to Him a little more often." His ways are higher, the way heaven is higher than earth which is to say, not on the same plain of existence at all. You don't get to bring the distance down to a level where your objection counts as a rebuttal.

We don't fully know why God decided the things He decides to do. 

Perfect example: Baptism. Why is that necessary?  Immersion in water, in His pattern, in His order, belief, repentance, confession, baptism is the point at which a person's sins are washed away and they're added to the body of Christ. 

We have the texts. Peter tells the crowd at Pentecost to repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of their sins (Acts 2:38). Ananias tells Saul, already believing, already praying, to get up and be baptized and wash away his sins (Acts 22:16). Paul tells the Romans that we were buried with Christ through baptism into death, so that we too might walk in newness of life (Romans 6:3-4)  not as a metaphor tacked on after the real salvation happened, but as the burial itself. Peter says outright that baptism now saves you (1 Peter 3:21), and goes out of his way to clarify he doesn't mean a bath.

I can't give you the full mechanism of why God set things up that way instead of some other way.

But what I do know is that the pattern is in the text, repeated, consistent, and not contingent on my being able to explain it to your satisfaction or mine.

And here's where I'll be blunt, a lot of people reject Gods pattern not because Scripture is unclear, but because it's inconvenient. It doesn't fit the version of God they'd prefer, the transaction is entirely on their terms and they build a theology that fits them.

That is not humility before a text you don't fully understand. That's the creation renegotiating with the Creator.

"Will what is formed say to the one who formed it, 'Why did you make me like this?'" (Romans 9:20).

I'm not saying don't study. I'm not saying don't ask why. Job asked why for thirty chapters and God let it stand as more honest than his friends' bad answers. 

Ask everything you want to ask. But there's a difference between asking God to help you understand His pattern and asking God to justify His pattern to you before you'll consent to it. The first one is faith looking for understanding. The second one is just negotiating.

I didn't need the mechanism on the bandaid. I needed the humility to admit the pediatrician knew something about my kid's stomach that I didn't. That cost me nothing, and it bought us a clean minivan.

Scripture is asking for the same trade, except the thing on the other side of the deal is your soul.

Love you dearly. Jacob.