Something I’ve learnt over the past 3 or 4 months is that God has a sense of humour. Now,many people might argue in saying ‘’That’s not theologically correct, God is very serious.’’ Well I disagree. His timing, the way he shows up and the way he tries to tell us stuff is quite funny sometimes. Now, not funny in the ‘’Where do postmen go on holiday? Parcelona,’’ kind of way where I’m left with a sore stomach close to a six pack from laughing for 8 hours but more of an ironic humour. I bought my first Bible 5 years ago. It’s a small pink and overly girly teenage Bible with quotes from various celebrities (who aren’t even that well known!) about how they love the Lord and how girls are so beautiful and valued and all that jazz. In the five years I owned this Bible I never read these quotes. To me they were just cheesy quotes that never really sink into any teenage girls brain, so what was the point? But it wasn’t till this year when I was looking in my Bible for some verses for some young girls that I had led in a small group, that I stumbled across such a gem.

“It’s not about who we are, but whose we are.”

There it was staring back at me. Even as I’m writing this I googled it to make sure I had the wording and spelling right and there it was once again looking at me in the face (Put ‘ishine girls bible’ into Google images if you want to see for yourself!) I had heard this quote over summer at a camp and thought it was amazing and as usual it had left my head, but just when I needed to hear it the most it was there in my 5 year old tattered bible that had pages upon pages of abandoned gems that i had never read. Funny eh?

The other time that I’ve seen God’s humour shine through was just a couple of weeks ago. I was at a youth weekend called Autumn Soul and in the middle of a talk one of my really good friends leaned over to me and said ‘’Hey..so I’ve got a picture for you’’ and to me they are some of the scariest words you can hear from a Christian because it either means you’re going to hear something you’ve tried to avoid, something you really need to hear or the most random thing you could think of. For me I got all three. ‘’So God has given me a picture of a spirograph for you. I don’t know what this means but yeah’’ Didn’t I tell you God has a sense of humour? A spirograph? One of those toys you probably got for Christmas when you were between the ages of 8-11 and after approximately the 10th use there was either pieces missing from it or it found itself a nice new home in the attic for the next five years.

Was God telling me that I was going to be thrown away and not talked about for the next five years?

Don’t be silly, God has a sense of humour remember? And with any picture he gives people you can be guaranteed a slightly confusing or very certain explanation. After praying about it and talking to someone about it I finally found the meaning of the whacky spirograph picture. And to no surprise it was something I had been struggling with and thinking about the past few months. God had shown up in one of the most random and fun ways he could..through a picture of a kid’s toy.

They are just two ways in which God spoke to me in such random and funny ways but there have been so many over the past few months in my life and in the lives of the people I live and work with. Whether it has been a church singing ‘Shine Jesus Shine’ straight after our kids talk on light even though they didn’t know our theme or another church having banners that say ‘’LET YOUR LIGHT SHINE’’ or ‘’I am the light!’’ at the same service we were talking about light or even God nudging someone into having a conversation with a homeless man who turned out to have been a Christian once in his life resulting in a random time of prayer in the middle of a busy Belfast street.

While most of you may be reading this like ‘Tara,this means nothing to any of us please stop your waffling as usual!!’ at least take this – God has a sense of humour! (I’ve only said it about 3 times already!)

In the times where you question is this God speaking to me or is it just a weird coincidence, the answer is normally “Yes, it is God.”

God is speaking to you in a random way because he likes to make us laugh from time to time. And as someone said it to me once, do you normally think of those things? I hardly doubt my friend spends all her waking minutes thinking about her love of the popular toy that first came out in 1965. And even if it is a random spirograph he places in your heart for someone, tell them because for me it was something I needed to hear the most.