No Ikea Manuals Please
Be okay with the wild mystery of things
It’s a cool 77 outside and the sky has a beautiful gradient to it as the sun sets, leaving every leaf with a luminous glow around its edges. They each seem to have their own personal halo. I guess it’s true, any place can be holy ground if we are attentive.
The grill is on and the smell of propane and fresh sausages assaults my senses as I hear the echoes of a woodpecker on a distant tree. I’m thinking about the idea of mystery and how we grow as people. We just got finished fasting and praying for three weeks as a church and I recall the common thoughts and questions that would come up: “How does this really work?” and “What if I break my fast? Does it mean I ruin the whole thing? Will God still bless me…?” They are honest questions, but they reveal something about how we think about how we actually change and grow as people.
Humans are so quick to try to put everything into a box. Everything needs a formula, an answer, an explanation. If 1+1=2 then shouldn’t me doing this certain action automatically lead to a specific response. Well… not really. Not with this life and certainly not a life with God. We want Ikea manuals for everything; for how to pray, for how to read the Bible, for how to raise our kids, for how to grow in being compassionate. But those don’t exist. There are no easy and quick steps for how to grow. No clear, straight path for maturity. The only path that exists is the wild one through fire, up hills, through strange forests that make us get a bit lost and down in the valleys where we barely see the light.
I don’t want a faith that is plug and play. That is like thinking we can fit Niagara Falls into a Ziplock bag. It’s like trying to make God into an AI chatbot where we input questions and He spits out ready-made answers. No. We need the journey, the struggle, the wrestle, the mystery. We need the liturgy, the practice, the long-obedience in the same direction. This is what makes us. The mystery of it all is actually beautiful — and it’s in this tension where we get to put our real faith in the real Jesus and trust Him as we put one foot in front of the other.
If you are bored with life, it might be because you have sucked out all the mystery and have an answer for everything. Let it all be bigger than yourself, than what you can understand or wrap your neatly-tied theology around.
Jesus is so much bigger and so much better. He is the mystery and the journey; the way, the truth and the wild life!
Yes, great observation! Like Chesterton have written:
"Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic."