Last summer at a spiritual retreat, the question was posed, “How do you feel about the idea of mystery?”
The woman next to me took the words out of my mouth, “I like the idea of mystery, just not as it applies to me.”
I’ll have what she’s having.
While there’s something about mystery that intrigues and invites us, leaning into mystery can be frightening. It’s unknown, unpredictable and uncontrollable.
And God is mysterious.
Pondering the idea that there is so much about Him that is beyond our comprehension, that He is a being unbound by our limitations, is exciting. It’s an invitation to experience awe, wonder, the miraculous.
That’s what I like about the idea of mystery. It’s humbling in a way that frees us. We don’t have to know everything-we can trust what is simply beyond us.
But leaning into that means letting go of whatever modicum of control we might think we have. It calls us to surrender to something we can’t grasp, something greater than we can imagine. We have to submit to a God whose ways are often unpredictable and incomprehensible. We cannot shape Him in our own image anymore.
My friend Catherine McNeil, in her new book, All Shall Be Well, says, “We’re dying to leave the mystery behind for an idol, to form God, life, and the future into something that makes sense . . . sometimes we just can’t handle the wildness of it all.”
Like I said, less appealing when it applies to my own life.
But everything about God screams mystery.
He says Himself that His ways and thoughts are so much higher than ours. Would any of us have written the redemption story the way He has? Would we lead people to wander in a desert for 40 years or make predictions of a Messiah 400 years before His birth, or send that promise in the form of an infant?
But think of what all that mysterious work has given us. Would I substitute my salvation for a knowable, predictable god who does exactly what I ask? When I balk at mystery, what I think I’m really doing is thinking somehow that my version of the story would be better.
It never is.
Leaning into mystery is contingent on a dogged faith in the love of God for us. To believe that, as C.S. Lewis said with regard to his Christ figure Aslan, “Of course he isn’t safe. But he is good.”
I can have a safe God or a good one. I will not allow myself to be caught up in mystery if I’m not convinced that the Mystery is relentlessly committed to loving goodness toward me.
2019 was a mysterious year in many ways. I didn’t understand what God was doing with my health. I wondered how this book would turn out in the end. We waited on answers to prayer, wondering what on earth He would do. How easy it is to want to grasp for that which is in our control rather than to surrender to His ways.
But as I look back on my life and the seasons where I most wondered, “What is He up to?” I see the fruit. I see that the ways He worked things really were better than I could have imagined. That gives me hope to keep leaning into the mystery of God.
This is the life of faith. We may not always understand Him, but we can trust Him.
