If your beliefs don’t seem strange to you, you haven’t thought about them much. If you are a Christian, your religion should leave you at least a little confused.

I don’t mean the cheap imitations of Christianity we see all over the place with their blasphemous perversions and simplifications like “Do good things so you can go to heaven” or “Follow some rules, then you can pray and get stuff.”

No, those kinds of beliefs make a lot of sense to us – to much sense. Everything’s tidied up and in place. They let us come up with a quick answer for anything that happens. It’s comfy, and it fits the way our brains work.

But that’s just because we made it up with our brains. It fits in our heads nicely because we built it out of ourselves.

If you want a faith that’s transcendent, something that has a divine spark of revelation to it, it shouldn’t fit. Maybe you can wrap your mind around part of it, but not all of it simultaneously.

Don’t shy away from ideas that go beyond what makes sense to us. Many of the truest things we know about seem absurd. Dig down even a little into our understanding of the universe, and things start to get funny. But it doesn’t mean they’re not true, it just means we’re not used to them.

That New Testament we’re fond of reading around here talks about the “mystery of the gospel” a lot. A mystery isn’t something we’re supposed to be able to figure out and be okay with in a few minutes – or in a lifetime.

Strange doesn’t mean wrong. It means strange. Different. Not of ourselves. And that’s great, because a true faith is supposed to be revealed from a God who is beyond us.

The oddness of Christianity gives credence to it being of God. The bizarre elements of the incarnation give uscause to think it wasn’t just made up by some fishermen. If it was, they did a poor job of making something easily believable.

Finding ways to make your faith easier to believe works against its purpose. Don’t be afraid to think about the weird things.

Admit to yourself that you don’t understand everything about your religion, or about God’s plan, or about salvation, but take some solace in the fact that something from God should not be easy to understand.