We’ve all been lured by the mystery bag. Usually simple, brown paper bag full of odds and ends that couldn’t sell any other way. Somehow though, the gamble of not knowing what you might get calls to us.
I remember being at a school fair in third or fourth grade and feeling blindly with my fingers the shape and weight of each mystery item. What magic could this simple bag hold? It felt like a pencil…but what if it wasn’t? What if it was something more? What if it was a magic wand? And who could tell you it wasn’t? I mean how could they know what was in the bag? It was a mystery!
This is how I feel like I have lived my life; standing over a tub full of brown paper bags, feeling the insides with my fingers…using only one sense to declare what was what. Now I have all these bags, piled around me on the floor and its time to open them and I am finding that not too many contain those things I thought they did.
This one felt like true love, but it was really just life long affection. This one felt like home but it was really only a resting spot. This one felt like the truth, but it was really a horrible untruth. This one felt like God but it was really only a likeness of one aspect of one smidge of Him.
At first the disappointment was overwhelming. Nothing was exactly what I had htought it was. So I ceased opening packages. I stopped looking to closely at anything. But recently I am realizing that the mystery items in the bags (opened and not yet seen) are turning out to be so much better than what I had imagined them to be.
Instead of feeling the outside of the bags, these days, I am simply opening them, and seeing what’s on offer. What gift does the mystery bag have for me today?
