Does God Expect Our First Response to Be Perfect?
What Abraham’s laughter taught me about faith.
Welcome to today’s reflection.
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My wife Rachel came home from work recently looking unusually serious.
“I nearly crashed the car on the way home.”
Before I even realised what I was doing, I laughed.
Not because I thought it was funny. If anything, quite the opposite. The danger had already passed, and thankfully, she was completely unharmed. But for some reason, laughter was simply the first place my mind went while it tried to catch up with what I’d just heard.
It’s something my family have learned about me over the years. When life throws something unexpected, difficult, or overwhelming in my direction, I often laugh first and process it afterwards.
It can seem insensitive, as though I’m making light of something serious, when in reality it’s simply the way my brain buys itself a few precious moments to absorb the news before it knows how to respond.
Our first reactions are often not the way we actually feel about things. Laughter doesn’t always mean amusement. It can be surprise, uncertainty, or simply another way of saying, I don’t quite know what to do with this yet.
That made me wonder whether we sometimes judge ourselves far too harshly for our instinctive reactions.
More importantly, I wonder whether we imagine God does too.
