Daily Prayer: When God's Ways Sound Like Nonsense to Everyone Else
Daily Prayer: When God's Ways Sound Like Nonsense to Everyone Else
"The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit."
— 1 Corinthians 2:14
I was standing at the kitchen counter this morning, coffee in hand, half-listening to a conversation my husband was having on the phone. At some point he said something about trusting God with a decision we've been sitting with, and I heard a little pause on the other end. Not a rude pause. Just — a pause. The kind that means I have no idea what you're talking about, but okay.
I smiled into my mug.
Not because it was funny, exactly. More because I recognized it. I've been on both sides of that pause.
There Was a Time I Didn't Get It Either
Before I had a real, living relationship with God — not just the idea of one, but the actual thing — faith-talk landed on me the same way. People would say things like "I felt peace about it" or "God closed that door" and I'd nod politely while internally filing it under things people say when they can't explain their decisions.
I wasn't being unkind. I just genuinely couldn't see what they were seeing.
That's exactly what Paul is describing in this verse. It's not that people without the Spirit are less intelligent or less thoughtful. It's that spiritual things require a kind of perception that doesn't come from intelligence or thoughtfulness alone. It comes from the Spirit of God living inside you, essentially translating things your natural mind would otherwise just scroll past.
Which, when I think about it, is actually kind of remarkable.
It's Less Like Learning and More Like Sight
I've been trying to explain faith to my adult daughter lately — not pushing, just answering her honest questions, which I love that she asks. And I keep running into this wall where the things I want to say are true, but they don't fully land the way I want them to.
I think this verse is why.
It's not that I need better words. It's that spiritual understanding isn't transferred through better words. You can't argue someone into perceiving something they don't yet have the capacity to perceive. That's not discouraging to me — it actually takes a weight off. My job isn't to be clever enough to convince her. My job is to love her well and pray, and trust that the Spirit does the part I can't do.
That feels like freedom, honestly.
The Foolishness Part Stings a Little (In a Good Way)
Paul says people without the Spirit consider these things foolishness. And I want to sit with that word for a second, because it's not a soft word.
The cross itself is called foolishness in the chapter just before this one. The idea that God would come as a human, die, and that death would somehow be the thing that saves everyone — from a purely logical standpoint, that's a hard sell. I get why people balk.
But here's what I keep coming back to: the fact that I don't balk anymore isn't because I'm smarter than I used to be. It's because something shifted that I didn't manufacture myself. The Spirit made the foolish thing make sense. That's a gift. A completely unearned one.
And it makes me gentler toward people who think I've gone a little soft in the head for believing what I believe. I know how they feel. I used to feel it too.
Living With the Translation Running in the Background
Most days, this plays out in small ways, not dramatic ones.
It's choosing not to say the sharp thing I could say, because something in me — not just politeness, but something deeper — pulls me back. It's feeling a nudge to check on someone and finding out later they really needed it. It's reading a verse I've read a hundred times and suddenly it means something new in a way I can't entirely explain.
That's the Spirit at work. Not always loud. Not always obvious. But present, and doing something I couldn't do on my own.
I find that genuinely comforting on the days when faith feels like a lot of work. Most of the heavy lifting isn't actually mine to do.
A Prayer for Today
God, thank You for the gift of the Spirit — for the fact that I can understand things about You that I genuinely couldn't see before. I don't take that for granted today.
Help me stay humble about it. I know it's not something I earned or figured out on my own. And help me stay patient with people who aren't there yet — the way You were patient with me.
For the people I love who are still in the middle of that pause — the ones who hear faith-talk and can't quite make sense of it — would You do what only You can do? I can't talk them into it. I know that. But You can reach them in ways I can't.
Keep the translation running in me today. Even in the small stuff. Especially in the small stuff.
Amen.
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