Why God is Like a Crazy Woman Sweeping

by Dave JohnsonDave is one of my best friends, and he's been the Senior Pastor at our church for over 30 years. Enjoy this post. I cried when I read it. You can't follow him on twitter or Facebook. He's old school. So what if it's true? What if God's grace is bigger and broader and deeper than anything we could know or even imagine?I'll never forget where I was, or what I was doing when I met her, this missionary woman who was on leave from her post in Afghanistan.She asked, "Could I have just a moment of your time?"She then explained to me her work with young girls in Afghanistan prisons. Girls who were there not because they had stolen or lied, but because (in many cases) they had been raped, or otherwise abused, and had dared to say it out loud (thus making them a target for even more abuse)."These girls are helpless and hopeless" she said to me, with her hands nervously shaking and her eyes brimming with tears, "So here's what I need to know…is God really like that 'Crazy Woman' sweeping?" I thought the talk that I'd just given had gone well. We'd been working thru a sermon series on the Parables of Jesus, when in Luke 15, we came upon three of his best known – the parables of the lost sheep, the lost son, and the lost coin. All three were designed by Jesus to describe, to some very religious and rigid people, what kind of God that God really is.Well, as it turns out (according to Jesus), he's the kind of God who goes looking for lost sheep, who happily welcomes the lost son, and who frantically searches for the lost coins. Lost coins, who unlike the wandering sheep and rebellious son, had nothing to do with their lostness. They were inanimate objects with no volition or capacity to decide, they had simply fallen through the cracks - they were the loose change that you wouldn't even notice that you'd lost, cause they weren't worth very much – maybe a nickel or a quarter.But God, in the parable, is like this "Crazy Woman" sweeping; according to Jesus, she doesn't STOP sweeping until she finds it.So what if it works like that? What if, when it comes to the least and the lost little ones of the world, what if, the first thing that they see when they die is this crazy woman sweeping? And what if, when this Crazy Woman sees the lost coin (on the other side of eternity), the first thing that she does is scream with delight, saying "OH, THERE YOU ARE! I've been looking all over for you - I need to call my friends – we need to have a party – for that which was lost has been found – we need to leap and dance and laugh for joy!"So what if it's true? What if God's grace is bigger and broader and deeper than anything we could know or even imagine? What if there really is this "Crazy Woman" sweeping, and what if her name is God?"