Encouragement

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Have you ever watched light playing upon crystals? The shapes and colors reflected are endless. Each time the crystals are moved the dance continues, new nuances to delight and stimulate wonder. Eleanor Porter describes Pollyanna’s excitement as she created a fairyland of sumptuous color, a room aflame with shimmering reds and greens, violet, orange, gold and blue, the combinations of colors were eternal, as the sun shone through the window and played upon the rows of hanging crystals. I never tire reading about the scene in this wonderful children’s classic.

Just as light refracted from the crystals never fails to bring delight, awe and surprise, so too do the many facets of our Heavenly Father. He is mysterious, full of new revelations, new ways to be known that leave us in wonder. His ways are immeasurable, and like the crystals dancing in the light, the mystery of God is a thing of beauty to behold. Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in Mystery, we shall learn nothing.

Yet mystery flies in the face of Western Christians. We have been raised to rely on and believe in logic, to know that all things work in a linear line, to be free from living with the tension of ambiguity and uncertainty. We would prefer to understand God, know all His ways and have them compartmentalized, ordered, controlled. Who doesn’t want to know where we stand, and define where we think God ought to stand? Yes, mastery, not mystery is more our style.

The Bible clearly says, ‘My ways are not your ways, neither are my thoughts yours, but evangelicals have been taught that they can know God fully. Can we unlearn this ingrained pattern and humbly accept that the more we know of God, the less we really know? God is too big for any box. He can not be neatly managed or packaged in order to ease our need for certainty and safeness.

The moment we attempt to master Him is the moment we cease to grow. How sad. Instead mystery is the heart of a dynamic, growing relationship with God. Proverbs 25:2 states, ‘It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter.’ Are we searching out more of God, or instead have we decided we have him figured out? Like the endless combinations of color in sunlit crystals, there is so much more to behold and discover of God. And like a parent who hides a present from a child and then delight in the discovery of it, so too does God rejoice when we learn more of Him.

Let’s not grow complacent and satisfied with whom we have surmised God to be, but resolve to know Him more, discover Him more and delight in Him more.


Reflective Moments

Have I grown satisfied, or is there a yearning to know more of God?

What has God been showing me lately about Himself from the Word, from the world and from others?

How well am I living with the ambiguities of God? Do I become restless when God does not appear to me as I think He should?

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