Let's Be Fools

Hosea 9:7 "....Israel knows!  The prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is insane, because of the greatness of your iniquity and great enmity."

I was standing and preaching in the free speech area at U.C. Irvine, when a professor broke through the crowd of students to stand right in front of me.  Most of the sixty or so students kept their distance from me.  They were standing in a ring around me, I'm guessing about twelve feet away.  As I spoke I would keep turning in a slow circle, but when the professor moved up close within a couple of feet, I stopped my slow spin and spoke just facing her.  I kept thinking she was going to try to enter into a debate at any moment, but she didn't say anything.  By her facial expressions I could see she was unhappy, then after a couple of minutes she sort of dismissed me with a wave of her hand and a loud ttttshshsh sound.  As she walked away shaking her head, her message to me and the students seemed pretty clear, she thought I was an ignorant crazy fool.  I felt a sadness not for what she thought of me, but because at the moment of the ttttshshsh, I wasn't setting forth my concepts or opinions, I was simply reading the words of Jesus from the Gospel of Mark.  We are living in days that mirror the days of the prophet Hosea.  Things had gotten so bad in Israel that God's prophets were considered fools and those who loved God were thought to be crazy, and yes it is that way today!  How sorry that when we proclaim the words of Jesus we are thought of as fools.  The issue for us today, is are we willing to appear foolish to the world for the sake of the truth?  Will we shine forth the Gospel in an ever darkening world, even if the think we're crazy?  Remember in these last days we shouldn't worry about what the world thinks of us, our main concern is to faithfully and lovingly proclaim our Savior Jesus.