Heaven’s honor roll reads like a Who’s Who of bungling. And I love it!

I must have slammed into so many closed doors in my spiritual job search that my whole head is a dead end. Of my legendary brain malfunctions, you’ll squeeze just one example from me. Divulge more, and I’d be sentenced to wearing a paper bag over my head for the rest of my natural life – and that’s a prospect I don’t relish, no matter how much you think it improves my looks.

I was about to go home when a manager said he couldn’t start his car. Some idiot had left the headlights on. Suddenly my nerves thought I’d caught malaria. That morning I had tested the lights of our entire vehicle fleet. ‘That’s strange,’ added another manager, ‘I can’t start my car either – battery’s dead.’ (It was definitely malaria, maybe yellow fever as well.) Up walked another manager – and was that another one behind him?

I’ve got a mechanical mind; it’s just that the gears have jammed.

When I have mistake and onions it’s neither rare nor well done. And just when I’ve had my fill I’m forced to eat my words. And that’s only the entrée. Somehow I always end up in the soup and have to pay for it. Humble pie follows with a generous serve of raspberries and I scream.

I make more slips than a lingerie company. As my mind lurches from one goof-up to the next, I fill with despair. Then I limp to the Bible and find comfort. I bump into Isaac, who blessed the wrong twin (Genesis 27:21-35); and Jacob, the scheming mummy’s boy, who had to marry his sister-in-law to patch up his first mistake (Genesis 29:20-28). I hear Job clawing for words to recount the tragedy that marred his childhood – he was born alive (Job 3:1-19). I see Saul hiding amongst the baggage (1 Samuel 10:22); David squabbling with his brothers (1 Samuel 17:28-29); Jonah bewailing the death of a weed (Jonah 4:7-9); Thomas poking holes in Jesus’ side (John 20:24-25). I don’t know that they had pogo sticks back then, but if they did, they played under the table for too long. Hard-boiled? These egg-heads were always in hot water. Whenever they had a brainwave heaven ducked for cover. Of course, Solomon had a good head on his shoulders – a cute brunette one night, a redhead the next. I think he ended up counting his wives and kissing his money.

Jesus hand-picked the quiet, intelligent type. When they were quiet, they were intelligent. They spent the rest of their time turning howlers into an art form. Their business cards must have read Bloopers for Every Occasion. There were the sons of blunder, James and John, armed with tongues programmed to shoot first and ask questions at the murder trial. Those thunder-heads even thought the Prince of Peace was into star wars (Luke 9:54). Then there was Peter, whose mouth went into spasms whenever his brain died. He always spoke with his mouth full, and still found room for the other foot. (Any normal sized mouth would have had corns.) You were sure to find this crying shame somewhere between boo-boo and boo-hoo. And while our silver tongued, lead brained hero was doing what came naturally, everyone else was scrambling to prove they had the IQ of a doughnut hole. Who could forget that ridiculous prayer-meeting when the maid left Peter locked out in the cold, the pray-ers thought the maid had gone around the twist for being so stupid as to think their prayers had been answered, and they finally made the brilliant deduction that the guy, who looks and sounds like Peter bashing on the door, must be Peter’s angel (Acts 12:12-16)? They believed in keeping their brains in ‘as new’ condition. Remember the dozer with the window seat who fell three floors to sleep during Paul’s sermon (Acts 20:9)? They make that drop-out look like a genius. Paul wasn’t kidding when he said that by normal standards few of the Corinthian Christians were wise (1 Corinthians 2:26-27). If they were anything like the rest, you could pool their intellects and not have enough to power a headache.

I could put my feet up with folks like that. And what fires me is that these scatter-brains are God’s sort of people – the type through whom he changes the world.