Holy Mystery

I wonder sometimes if our troubles could possibly be part of the holy mystery in which we walk day to day.  After all, life is one great mystery.  It is not just the mystery of nature doing its thing like showing us a sunrise every morning, or giving breath to seed planted deep in the earth, or winged birds flying from one part of the world to another year after year.  The real mystery is the one which enables us to see and know the presence of the Holy One in the most ordinary of things of life.  Surely, when we think of the ordinary things of life, we think of its troubles and its sufferings for life cannot be lived without them.

This truth we learn and accept after a few years or more of living.  Trying to pretend all is well may work for some for a time, but it soon ushers in the deepest kind of despair.  The only way to live with the troubles of life is to embrace them as those things which are a part of its fabric.  All of the troubling and difficult things which come to us may not really come from God, but they are things that are allowed.  Why some things are not really a part of the intentional will of God, but the permissive will of God, I cannot begin to understand.  Mystery. 

We are always on the edge of it.  We are always in the midst of it.  We are born into it.  We live surrounded by it.  We will surely die with its shadow still covering us.  In the mystery is the presence and the work of God's Holy Spirit.  What He is doing out there in the unseen edges we cannot see and know.  But, our seeing and knowing what He is about is not necessary for Him to be out there in the unseeable realms of life doing good for us regardless of the circumstances.  Life is one mystery after another.  Such is the way God is revealed to us.