Do you remember playing hide-and-seek as a kid? I remember the thrill of searching out secret places to hide, or uncovering an opponent well hidden amongst familiar surroundings. Because I love the thrill of adventure and discovery, I’m ever looking past my familiar environment for things undiscovered, remaining hidden to my understanding. I just love mystery!
My husband Mark and I were recently discussing the importance of intentionally exposing oneself to new and unfamiliar experiences. We believe it’s important to regularly encounter different environments outside of our own comfort zone. For any of us there is a vast realm of things outside our own personal scope of exposure that could broaden our world as we know it.
The whole issue of looking for something that you know not of can be perplexing. Clearly there is a magnitude of knowledge and experience that is off the chart and would easily be in our personal realm of the “unknown." With that in mind if we aren’t deliberately looking for the unfamiliar we are most surely going to miss what could be right in front of our eyes.
Jesus said to His disciples, “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but to the rest it is in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.” (Luke 8:10)
We don’t want to miss this important point. We are those who have been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom! So how do we become a person who can see what is mysteriously hidden? Don’t worry the disciples weren’t to clear about this either.
And take a look at what Paul said,“This is my life work: helping people understand and respond to this Message. It came as a sheer gift to me, a real surprise, God handling all the details. When it came to presenting the Message to people who had no background in God's way, I was the least qualified of any of the available Christians. God saw to it that I was equipped, but you can be sure that it had nothing to do with my natural abilities. And so here I am, preaching and writing about things that are way over my head, the inexhaustible riches and generosity of Christ. My task is to bring out in the open and make plain what God, who created all this in the first place, has been doing in secret and behind the scenes all along.” (Ephesians 3:7 MSG)
To become those that steward the mysteries of God I believe the best place to start is to ask.
Ask! -“…ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and it will be opened to you.” (Luke 11:9)
And then Proclaim…Proclaim it out loud!-"It has been granted to me 'to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God' and 'My task is to bring out in the open and make plain what God, who created all this in the first place, has been doing in secret and behind the scenes all along.” (Ephesians 3:9)
Now that’s good stuff! And that’s why I love a good adventure and the search for hidden mysteries!
