Snuggies and God

I read an article the other day about a court case involving the Snuggie.  You remember the Snuggie, right?  The “blanket with sleeves”?  Maybe you even have one.  They’ve sold twenty million of them, so somebody must be buying them.  Anyway, the court case was about whether a Snuggie truly is a blanket, as it’s advertised, or whether it’s actually a piece of clothing.  

That may seem to you like a silly thing to go to court about, but it’s actually pretty important, at least if you own the Snuggie company.  See, Snuggies are made in another country and then brought over to the United States for sale, and there are import taxes that take effect when you do that.  If Snuggies are blankets, they pay one tax rate.  If they’re clothing they pay another, higher tax rate.  So if you own the Snuggie company, you want them to be classified as blankets so you can pay the lower rate.  If you’re the United States government, you want them to be classified as clothing, so you can collect the higher rate.

So why am I telling you about this?  I mean, apart from the fact that “Snuggie” is a fun word to say and even to type.  Well, think about this.  Think about being the guy who invented the Snuggie.  Think about the first time you took it to some corporation and tried to get them interested in it.  They look at it and say, “It’s a bathrobe.”  You say, no, no, it’s a Snuggie.  “It’s a blanket with sleeves.”  They say, “It’s a bathrobe that you’re wearing the wrong way around.”

The point is that I’m sure there were a lot of people who thought this guy was a fool for thinking he could make money marketing a “blanket with sleeves”.  But he proved them wrong.

Think about that got me thinking about all the times in the Bible God asked people to risk looking like fools.  “Moses, go to the mighty Pharaoh and tell him to let the people of Israel go.”  “David, take your slingshot and go against the giant Goliath.”  “Naaman, go and wash in the Jordan River and you’ll be cured of your leprosy.”  “Joshua, have your troops march around Jericho seven times and blow trumpets.”  On and on and on.  God asks people to do things that sound stupid.  And yet, it works out for the best.

I’ve written before about how the best way to grow our church is to personally invite people to church.  One of the reasons we don’t do that is because we’re afraid of what people will think of us if we do.  We’re afraid people will look down on us.  We’re afraid people will not like us.  We’re afraid that we’ll sound stupid.

And yet, God is asking us to do that.  This is part of what that whole “Go and make disciples” thing is about.  God is asking us to stop caring what people might think.  Instead, reach out to people and invite them to church.  Yes, there’s a chance we might sound stupid.  But there’s also a chance they might say yes.  There’s also a chance that we’ll make a disciple of Jesus Christ.  If we don’t do it, we won’t risk sounding stupid.  But we won’t make any disciples, either.

So take a chance.  Risk sounding stupid, even foolish.  It might not work.  But then again, it might.  And if we all pray for God’s help, I think we’ll find that sometimes, it will.