When encountering the unusual or unexpected, many religious people like to remark, "Well, the Lord works in mysterious ways."
     So he does.  Why would he not?  He's infinite, we're merely finite.  For us, nearly everything God does is a mystery.  Frequently, this mystery is quite confounding.
     The other day I watched, as I had several times before, the 1982 Academy Award winning movie, "Chariots of Fire."  "Chariots," which is a true story, presents the lives of two British runners, Harold Abrams, a Jewish student at Cambridge, and Eric Liddell, a Scottish missionary in China, and how their lives come together and intertwine at the 1924 Olympics in Paris.  Each of them wins his race:  Abrams, the 100 meter dash; Liddell, the 400 meter run.  Throughout the movie, we are shown how for Abrams, running is an existential quest, what he does to affirm his existence.  As he states before he runs his race, "I have ten seconds to justify my entire existence."
     For Liddell, his running is what, as he sees it, gives God pleasure.  God, he believes, has made him fast, and he wants to run his races for God.  He likes to win, but he likes for God to win more.  As the movie draws to a close, we are told that after the Olympics Abrams returned to England in triumph, married an opera star, and became the "elder statesman" of British athletics.  He died in 1978.  On the other hand, Liddell, we are told, returned to the mission field in China, where he died of a brain tumor in a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War.  All Scotland, the movie tells us, "mourned" his passing.
     Christians of most every ilk loved this movie, and many believed that its winning the Academy Award for best picture demonstrated that God was blessing it for his use. Perhaps this is true.  It later came out, however, that Ian Charleson, the actor who so capably played Eric Liddell, was in fact a gay man when he did the role. (Regrettably, he succumbed to AIDS in 1990.)  Considering the opprobrium that some Christians heap upon the gay community, this is perhaps the ultimate irony.  Despite everything we might say or think, it seems clear that God used a person with whose lifestyle many Christians vehemently disagree to definitively proclaim the fact and worth of his name to the world.
     The Lord indeed works in mysterious ways.  And may we never suppose or think that we know completely how he does so.