I spent my high school years and my college summers in southern Florida. Though I do not have the “nature of the sea” in me, I do love to snorkel and scuba dive. I remember driving along the beach, seeing people play in the shallow surf, and thinking, Why don’t they go out into the deeper waters where the real fun, beauty, and adventure is? I’m sure that many of these people had settled for the shallows because they weren’t sure they could handle the deeper water and were afraid of what might be out there. But they were missing so much—they were too much in the “land world,” and therefore they were missing the “underwater world.” I am quite certain the deeper waters held what they were really looking for.
It’s the same for us as followers of Jesus Christ. We stay in the shallows of Christianity—in smaller, safer, more understandable and controllable stories where we “know what we are doing.” But we find few answers there to the deeper questions about who we are and what our place in this world really is…
Many of us wrestle with understanding the way chosen for us simply because we resist the deep (mystery), preferring the shallow instead. It is only as we embrace and journey into mystery that God will reveal who He is, who we are, and the realities of His kingdom.
