Just as you’ll never understand
the mystery of life forming in a pregnant woman,
So you’ll never understand
the mystery at work in all that God does.
– Ecclesiastes 11:5 [MSG]
When I was a kid I used to, for my own personal enjoyment, read encyclopedias.
The mere fact that I used to read encyclopedias raises a couple of question marks. First of those questions revolves around my age: I have a working memory of a time in which encyclopedias were not yet obsolete (I’m aging). Secondly, I was the kind of kid who willingly chose to read them. What kid does that!? This was in the days where video games were in their infancy and could actually become boring after a while – more boring than a lot of things. To me, they could actually become more boring than an encyclopedia.
I read about things I liked. I looked at pictures of planes and presidents. I learned about ants and aardvarks (not in that order). I perused the map of the Soviet Union and learned of the daily toil of the mythological Sisyphus. While boredom may have been an initial motivator for reading encyclopedias, it was the idea that things could be known and understood that most attracted me to the reading. I liked the idea (and still do) that whatever was not understood, could be. As a child, if I overheard an adult say something about the Carter administration or the Falkland Islands and my curiosity was piqued, I could go into the spare bedroom and get a brief summary from one of the neatly leather-bound World Book albums on the lowest shelf of the bookcase. I could know.
In junior high school, I realized this wasn’t something the cool kids were into. So, I hid my secret quest for bits of what most everyone regarded as trivia. But, I still hungered to know things. I still do. It was also in junior high school where I was introduced to Jesus. Predictably, I went to the “J” World Book Encyclopedia… Jaguars…Japan…Jesus. While I could learn a lot about His life and ministry, I couldn’t understand that He somehow knew me. I have read a lot about Jesus. I teach a lot about Jesus. But, unlike a brief synopsis on Pompeii or pteranodons, my search for understanding God isn’t satisfactorily complete after a reading or two. Would we really want it to be so?
Learning to follow Jesus is seemingly as much about the embracing, occasional agonizing-over, and joyful pondering, as it is about the solidness of the “indisputables” surrounding Jesus’ life. In talking with people who are wiser, have a longer story of life with Jesus, and who are often older than me, I am beginning to grasp the concept that we might benefit from learning not to bring an end to our wonder, but to energize it.
To this day, I’m occasionally haunted by the words from Ecclesiastes: “you’ll never understand the mystery at work in all that God does.”
…And at other, less frequent times, I’ll be provoked to awe.
This weekend, we’ll begin our series: EPIC. Throughout the summer, we’ll look at some of the most famous and notorious characters in the Bible. In most cases, they are one in the same. This will be a great opportunity to invite people looking for a place where wonder, mystery, and the phrase “I don’t know” are regarded as critical to active faith in Jesus.
See you Sunday,
Jeff
