Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about mysteries, something I’ve loved for as long as I can remember. This is probably due to the fact that I’ve gotten sucked in, again, to a Netflix mystery/crime drama over the past several weeks. And, since I am so darn peace-loving and really do hate anything even remotely dark, I was wondering why I’ve always loved mysteries, stories which do consist of murder and betrayal and all of the other least desirable aspects of our human nature. As a very young girl, too young to be reading them in fact, I would steal away and lose myself in an Agatha Christie mystery, and I did so until I had read every single one I could find. And still today some of my favorite T.V. is any PBS mystery series.
The realization that has struck me this week as I draw near to the end of another beloved T.V. mystery series, the Netflix one, is that I haven’t actually felt the desire to read any mystery books in a long time; and it seems that when I lost my desire to read such books was actually when I began to get serious about the Bible. At first I thought that maybe this happened because God’s spirit was nudging my own to give up such things. But, then, another thought occurred to me. Perhaps such books have lost most of their appeal, not because there’s anything wrong with them, but because I’ve been drawn into an even greater mystery, the greatest mystery of all time actually–our great God, his ways and his Word.
Yes, I have realized after years of study that I know should have been much more intense than it often was that the Bible is the ultimate work of mystery literature. It oftentimes chronicles the unthinkable, and the details of its stories have endured through historical events many would deem un-survivable; yet, I can open it up every day and read it and ponder it and receive something new from it, even when I’m reading a part of it that I’ve already read and studied countless times throughout my life. This will probably make little to no sense to someone who has never experienced this. I say this because it never made sense to me when I heard it said; it only made sense to me when it became part of my own story.
This last thought has made me reflect on the novel my daughter and I are reading now. It’s George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin. Young Princess Irene cannot get her friend Curdie, also quite young, to see what she is seeing–to see what’s truly supernatural. Curdie gets “vexed” with her and she with him as they talk past one another; she has been drawn into the mystery of God but he hasn’t…..yet. I find this children’s novel to be such a beautiful example of how we can be living witnesses to and for one another, waiting and hoping for the Word to come alive to those all around us who haven’t yet experienced the realness of it all. Princess Irene isn’t smarter or more worthy than Curdie–she simply appears to be more open to what this world calls “imagination,” to the mysteries we cannot fully solve.
Regarding Curdie’s lack of belief, Irene’s grandmother says to her, “People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. I doubt if you would have believed it all yourself if you hadn’t seen some of it” (Chapter 22, page 170). Sometimes believing is hard for us but it is necessary, even and especially in the midst of the mystery of it all. God’s living word penetrating me down to the very marrow in my bones; God’s one and only Son, the Word in human flesh, being tortured and dying an agonizing criminal’s death; God’s sweet Spirit coming to reside in his followers after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. It is all one big “for real” mystery human beings, no matter the level of their intellect, can never fully explain–the one mystery most worth reading about.
“And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.”
1 Timothy 3:16 (KJV)
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