&

Baby platypuses. Oh mah goodness, the cuteness is unbearable.

Cuteness aside, platypuses (and yes, that’s the grammatically correct way to pluralize “platypus”) are weird. Very weird.

They have waterproof fur like a beaver and a big paddle tail like a beaver. They have webbed feet like a duck and lay eggs like a duck and sport a bill like a duck—but not exactly like a duck. 

They don’t use their eyes underwater and hunt via the detection of electric currents.

Venom shoots out their back feet. Venom, y’all.

When British explorers first sent platypus pelts back to mother England in the late 1700s, naturalists assumed it was a hoax. Some took scissors to the dried skin, looking for stitches. 

But alas, the platypus is real. You can fly to Australia and see one. Or go to a zoo. 

I’m thinking of the platypus today and thinking about God, too. About how God defies our expectations, about how He rarely fits in our boxes. I think of people taking scissors to God, looking for stitches…

This past Sunday Justin (the preacher-husband) started a series he’s calling “&.” It’s about complexity, about how rarely God-things fit into strict categories, about how sometimes God’s very characteristics seem at odds. 

If you know me, you know a discussion like this is right up my alley. 

This week we discussed God’s wrath & mercy. And while one might be tempted to talk about them together, about how God’s wrath is tempered by His mercy or about how He disciplines us because He loves us (both worthwhile studies), that’s not what we did.

Sometimes harmonizing the attributes of God leads us to soften them, to qualify them to the extent that God isn’t so much a God of just wrath or a God of unfailing mercy, but a khaki-colored, manageable God of our own making, sorta just and sorta loving. 

What Justin offered was an unfiltered, unqualified exposition of the God “who displays his wrath every day” (Psalm 7:11) and the God of “unfailing love” (Psalm 6:4). 

You HAVE to hear it. You just have to.  (CLICK the red words, people!)

We (as in all of us) need to approach God this way more often, embracing His complexity and praising Him for it.