“There is so much more going on than you can know or even imagine.” The refrain visited me, as it had in the past, after a restless night of wondering. I knew it to be true, for it had been true before. I surrendered myself to the arms of not-knowing and felt the sure embrace of the “much more” that is not mine to know but is mine to live. 

Perhaps you, too, have had times of such surrender, times when all you really knew was that you could not know, but that it was somehow sufficient, for you were only part of a larger whole. That larger whole was important and your role in that was important, despite the understanding that eluded you. For, our need to know is not, after all, the ultimate objective. I wonder sometimes if the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil somehow represented our obsession with this need-to-know. In the parlance of our times, “it’s not about you.” I, for one, need to be reminded from time to time.

On the other side of surrender are glimmers, serendipitous moments that allow us to glimpse the bigger picture. Frederick Buechner called them “signposts along the way, indications that we are, after all, on the right path, that something more is going on.”  

So often it is our way of knowing that shifts rather than the information we hold. The way we see the world, the way, even, that we see ourselves, can be transformed without our expectation. The week before Christmas, the barista/owner of The Coffee Container, surprised us with a gift. It was a picture she'd painted of us, or at least of us as she saw us. My husband and I visit regularly and we reminded her, she said, of Carl and Ellie in the movie, UP--just two people who found each other young, stayed together through the years, and made a good and happy life together. Really? That was what she saw in us? I didn't remember it as being that simple. I had not seen what she saw, but, truthfully, who's to say which vision is more accurate?

We hung the picture in our bedroom. Remember the old adage, "Lord, help me to be the person my dog thinks I am"? I look at the picture each morning and pray, "Lord, help us to be what Jolene seems to think we are." She gave us so much more than a picture. She gave us a new way of seeing and a new way of being.

The theologian, Karl Rahner, advised that the most important task of a Christian is to be aware. Glimmers and gifts, signposts along the way, messages in the night. God is preaching to us all the time, without the need of words.

May you walk into this new year aware, paying attention, and so be graced and surprised with God's wordless encouragement and silent companionship as you go.