There is much in life that is a mystery to me. How electricity works. How a computer works. How pretty much anything mechanical works. How I put two socks into a washing machine and only one seems to come out. How no matter how many lists I write, I still manage to forget the one thing I really went into the supermarket for!
And that’s only the things which are not, in reality, that mysterious. I have absolutely no idea how the earth turns on its axis (I’m not awfully sure I even know what those words mean) or how a rabbit knows by instinct how to hop and burrow. (Thumper is all set for the great escape from his outdoor cage, showing more ingenuity than I possess, despite ‘only’ being a rabbit.) Even the things which some people can understand and explain are a mystery to me.
To be honest, I’ve learned to live with mystery. I’ve had to. There is simply so much about this world that I don’t understand. I’ve had to learn to accept that some things simply are, whether I understand them or not. In Maxine Kumin’s words, ‘I put down roots and I put up leaf.‘ I don’t understand how growth comes even in the natural world, but perhaps it’s not as complicated as I think. Perhaps it is a mystery, but not one I’m meant to fathom, simply one I’m meant to embrace. Perhaps life is not so much a mystery to be solved in the way I like to work out ‘whodunnit’ in the crime mysteries I love, but a mystery to be embraced.
Michael Card sings of the mystery of the Incarnation:
‘When the Father longed to show
The love He wanted us to know
He sent His only Son and so
Became a holy embryo
That is the Mystery
More than you can see
Give up on your pondering
And fall down on your knees
A fiction that’s fantastic and wild –
A mother made by her own child!
A hopeless babe who cried
Was God Incarnate and man deified.
Because the fall did devastate,
Creator must now recreate,
So to take our sin
Was made like us so we could be like him.’ (‘To The Mystery’, Michael Card)
I can never fathom how God did this, but I can certainly embrace the reality of salvation.