Tradition.  It’s what we grow up with, the blueprint handed down to us from our parents and relatives, the road map that tells us what we’re supposed to be in life.

As Merriam Webster Online defines tradition: 1 a : an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior (as a religious practice or a social custom) b : a belief or story or a body of beliefs or stories relating to the past that are commonly accepted as historical though not verifiable.

OK, enough said after the dictionary is consulted.  The point is, there is a set of common assumptions that “this is the way life should be,” a pattern to follow in life, certain goals and aspirations to head for in the future.

The church also has its traditions.  Particular ways of identifying itself so that people know whether they belong or don’t.  A set of assumptions – often based on the Bible – that loosely or rigidly determine the culture and practices of the church.

God’s ways, though, can be so ‘non-traditional’.  Almost and sometimes exactly the polar opposite of the way of life passed down to us from family or church.  Without a divine transformation in our attitude toward the ways of God, we can assume that what we learned, inherited and otherwise assimilated in our thoughts from our society are the ways of God.  And God’s ways seem, well, backward.  Even wrong.  Scary.

God takes care of me in non-traditional ways.  I’m still deeply impressed by that thought.  It is profound.

I know you want an example of this, so let’s say, to be extremely simple. In America, we have goals. A job, preferably one with a six-figure income and stock options, is assumed to be the vehicle by which we receive care, which could be equated with large homes, BMWs, inground pools, boats, vacations to exotic lands.  And a family with two kids with whom we enjoy these benefits. Simplistically, the “American Dream”.

For me, I had a concept of care ingrained in me from my earliest years of family and family patterns. Mine revolved around a man – a husband would be there to provide me with a house and food.  I held on to this goal and concept with a force like superglue and assumed God would provide this, for this was the way – the only way – God would care for me.  I would have no other.

Does this mean that I am uncared for by God?  Traditionally speaking, yes.  This thought has crossed my mind more than once. There is no evidence that God cares for me if I base it on having a man to provide.

I grew beyond “needing” a man around for those provisions, and found I could get a job and by working hard, I would be cared for (clothed, fed and sheltered) by the income I earned from my job – a paycheck from a company.  But, jobs come and they go.  In a time when I am without a job, I might legitimately ask:

Two “traditional” sources of provision are not there for me.  How can God care for me, now, without those things?

The answer is astonishing.  God’s ways are not traditional.  Although they can be traditional.  The difficulty lies in thinking that the traditional ways God seems to be taking care of “everybody else” should be the same ways He takes care of me.

Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, My way is hidden from the LORD,

and my right is disregarded by my God?  Isaiah 40:27

Perhaps Israel, God’s chosen nation, fell into the same trap.  In fact, centuries of history bears out that they did.  From their earliest days as a nation, they were being fed with (non-traditional) manna, miraculously, every morning, for 40 years, and yet it just wasn’t the exact way they were cared for by their captors in Egypt.  It wasn’t how the Egyptians lived.  It wasn’t how any of the nations around them lived.  It must be wrong.

“Something is wrong with this picture, we liked it better, then!”

Why do I say “my way is hidden from the LORD, and my right is disregarded by my God?”  When this cry hits home and becomes personal, I realize that I do not recognize the miraculous, non-traditional ways God is taking care of me.  I crave the ways that are familiar – the traditions that I have seen work in the lives of other family members, friends.

Only by faith can I recognize that the  lilies of the field sermon, the story of Elijah after he ran away from Jezebel and laid down, depressed – these are the right ways, the God ways. Only by faith can I accept that the way of God does not lie in familiar sources.  God’s redemption is total, from the futile way of life inherited from our forefathers.  Even Jesus, the perfect lamb that was slain for the sins of the world, did not fit the traditional concept of what the Messiah would look like.

The point is not that God will never give me a job…or a good husband.  He may.  The point is to recognize God’s ways, and the fact that God is individually and specially honoring His word and actively caring for me – and for you – in non-traditional ways that may be well out of the paradigm of “what you signed up for.”  Everyone else may think you must be out of God’s will, too.  They thought that of Jesus. This is the walk of faith.