Seeing Beneath the Surface
“Look beneath the surface so you can judge correctly.”
There are realities we cannot see, truths we cannot touch.
I’ve had conversations with those who struggle with the intangibility of faith. “But how do I know that the Bible is true? How do I know that Jesus really lived? How do I know…”
Indeed. How do we know?
It is a quiet truth hidden in my bones. It is a certainty beyond describing. It is a shrug and saying, “I don’t know, yet I do, with all my heart and soul.”
There are some things that language can’t describe. Anything of the spiritual nature is beyond words. Language is a science, an art, creating order in our ways of thinking and interacting. Language is for communication, mostly for survival between one tribe and the next or one nation and another. Language identifies who is with and who is against.
It wasn’t always so. Before the disaster at the Tower of Babel, there was a unified language. I wonder if they had better words for the spiritual realities. They certainly seemed closer to them than we are today. However, the Tower was a strange God-given blessing at the very same time as it was a curse. It scattered the peoples, but it also gave rise to more languages—more ways of speaking, thinking, creating art, or simply surviving.
Try translating a single English word into any given language. It’s hard to do; the meaning is almost always incomplete, lost in translation. Most North Americans are monolingual (a serious deficit, in my opinion), resulting in a lack of ability to understand the nuances of language. Clearly, to see simply means to look with one’s eyes. But does it? Even in English, simple words carry more than one meaning; to see can also mean to perceive or to understand, or even to know. So you see, it’s not as simple as to say, “The language is clear! It obviously means [fill in the blank].”
I don’t say this to confuse you, but to attempt to put words to the mysterious and wonderful spirituality that we cannot see with our physical eyes, at least not unless those eyes have been [spiritually or metaphorically] opened.
A homeless person is just a homeless person. Until you see that they are indeed a person, a real, live human being with a family, parents, and loved ones, perhaps with an education, and most certainly with many stories of their own. There is a reason for their lost home, their addiction, or their present state of poor hygiene. When you see the reality beneath the surface, you can no longer discard them as a non-human, a thing, or even an animal (though in many cases, animals are certainly treated better than humans).
A job is just a job. Until you see that it is a God-given privilege to create life, warmth, and joy in the world—as a customer service rep, tradesperson, business professional, health care provider, homemaker, or parent. Suddenly, the job becomes a source of fulfillment as you see how your duties are connected to and serving the world that you live in. Stocking shelves provides goods to every person who walks through the door. Answering phones provides much-needed information. Wiring electricity ensures that people have safe access to light, food, and warmth. And on and on.
John Mark Comer, in his book Garden City, discusses the beautiful role of work and rest in the lives of God’s created humans. He also concedes that there are means of employment that are not good God-given privileges, like manufacturing weapons, managing a store that hustles its employees to work more, more, more, or any job that prioritizes capital over people.
That still leaves a whole lot of room for flourishing in almost every sector of work in our world, if only we see it as such.
A hobby is just a hobby… isn’t it? This, too, is a means of seeing God’s goodness in the ordinary things—woodworking, cooking, crafting, crocheting, reading. We take time to breathe and bask in the joy of good things. God-given things. We see beyond the surface; we see that hobbies aren’t ways to escape our world, but to live in it and take our rightful place within it as kings and queens, as priests, of our God Most High.
In all that we do, the kingdom of God may draw near. If we see it. The Spirit of Jesus is present as we work, play, love, laugh, create, and rest. Do we see it?
Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash
