The Beauty and Power of God is in the mystery

​At the foot of the cross, as Jesus breathed his final breaths, there were two very distinct groups of people.

There was the group celebrating his death. We have won, they thought. We have forever shut the mouth of the one who came to rob us of our voice.

And then there was a group mourning. Crying at the mere sight of the end. How did we get this so wrong, they wondered. We were sure he was the one who had come to give us a voice.

Three days later, Jesus rose from his grave. It turns out, in the moment of the cross, both groups were wrong.

Maybe there is no greater kind of being wrong than to ever get to a place of believing I fully know what God is up to. I am grateful to know that God is always up to SOMETHING in my life, but to ever proclaim I know exactly what that is, well that would be to rob God of his beautiful mystery.

It would in many ways be declaring, I AM God.

The story of my life is the mysterious direction of God, a direction that has quiet often worked in the opposite direction of what I was sure God was doing in my life. Or maybe even more, what God was doing in spite of my accusation that God had disappeared.

There is something scary about not knowing what God is up to. But I have lived on the other side of that fear long enough to know now that there is also something very beautiful about it. God's direction is almost always clouded by mystery.

It is much scarier for me these days to even get close to a place of believing I know exactly what God is up to, that I know exactly what God's intentions are, that I know exactly the plot God has written inside the plot that I am living.

The crowd watched Jesus die on a cross. The emotions were all over the place.

Everyone in the crowd believed they knew exactly what was happening.

No one did.

Maybe that is why, when Jesus was alive, before and AFTER the cross, Jesus always stressed, just love everyone.

If you really need to know the direction, that is it.

Just love everyone.

Maybe God has thought, if they ever fully know the details of where we are going, how we will get there and when we will arrive, they will forget the most important part of the journey. The part for which God has left absolutely no mystery.

Just love everyone.

Just love everyone, that doesn't always sound like a direction. Or a destination. It can begin to feel like a philosophical approach, a clinging of faith, to an ideal that helps us deal with the mystery.

But what if it is a place?

What if it is the final destination, this just love everyone.

What if we can get so absolutely certain about what God is doing in the events of our lives that we come to forget, dismiss, the most certain thing God as ever told us about them?

Just love everyone.

The crowd watched Jesus die on a cross. The emotions were all over the place.

Everyone in the crowd believed they knew exactly what was happening.

No one did.