Picking Your Team

This is me shooting from the hip, trying to unpack something that splashed in my face a few days ago. It had to do with the pattern I see in God "picking His team." Maybe it struck me when thinking about sports. Maybe when thinking about slavery. Maybe with the recent events in Egypt (i.e. Mubarak's displacement). But here's the punchline: God picks slaves, consistently, to showcase His agenda; to be His spokespeople. That's making a statement. Not only because it's a pattern we see throughout scripture, which alone would make it a worthwhile fire to stop and warm yourself by for a spell, but moreso because of how other it is from what I take to be the obvious approach.

Stop and warm yourself by this for a moment. How do we give our dreams a go? Dreams and visions bigger than ourselves; dreams that take a group of people to accomplish. We choose the best people for the job and equip them to do the work and cultivate an environment for them to flourish in. We pick an A-team. A dream team full of MVPs. Of course we do. I can't imagine doing anything else. Why would I? God chooses the slave, the weak, the persecuted. The underdog. Examples? To start with, humans aren't exactly the sharpest knives in the universal drawer: why not give the job to the angels right off the bat (the ones that are smarter and more powerful). Or how about Abraham: a man without a nation. A man and his children who aren't strangers to lying, cheating, and being strangers. The Hebrews: a nation of slaves in the hands of a more powerful and advanced civilization. Gideon, the lowest in his family, which was the lowest in the tribe, who led an army which time and time again got thinned down by God because it was "too big" and "too strong." Jesus, not a learned man, blue collar worker, dispised amung his people, a beaten and slain man. You get the picture.

Now either that's God using a different strategy than we do (by NOT picking the best people for the job), or that IS God picking the best people for the job (which begs the question, "what job are weak and bound the best for?"). And we're there. That's the rest stop. I don't know all of what we can learn about God through this, but it seems "characteristic."

Why through slaves? What do you see in this?