One of my pet peeves is how Christianity is depicted in the media and mass culture.

We are so often portrayed as pietistic perfectionists that we believe it ourselves.

We have bought into the premise that we must be perfect and pure, unmitigatedly good, to be a part of the church.

When bad things happen, when a marriage goes bad or a job is lost or a child disappoints, we think that it must be our weak faith that is to blame.

"If only I would have believed more or prayed harder or sung louder, none of this would have happened."

And so that is precisely what we try to do.

We try and act as if we’ve always got it all together. Happy, smiling, we pop a sticker on our bumper and shout hallelujah and pretend, for all the world to see, that we really believe.

Nothing bad, heck nothing even ordinary happens to us...because we believe!

Day after day, I meet with struggling folk who confess their confusion and fears. They can’t come to church, they tell me, because it brings out emotions that they don’t understand. They don’t want people to see them crying. Others speak of their sense of failure and anger when things haven’t gone the way they planned.

Underlying much of this talk is the mistaken belief that Christianity should solve all our problems, take away all our pain.

That’s the way it is often depicted. A panacea for the problems of life.

But that’s not biblical.

That’s bull.

It is the kind of fallacious understanding that is perpetuated whenever we fail to understand that God works often in very ordinary ways.

Have you ever marveled over God’s decision to become a human being?

When you think about it, if God is God then God could have chosen any manner and means to reveal divine truth.

God might have become a book that gives us all the answers but God did not.

God might have chosen to be a 3-D movie and overwhelmed us with special effects but God chose instead to reveal God’s self via a carpenter from a hick town called Nazareth.

Shouldn’t that amazing fact remind us that the ways of God are often very humble and simple, filled with the very ordinariness that we experience daily?

Miracles do surely happen but sometimes, often times, they come in quiet, unassuming ways.