The Unexpected Journey

I’d picked up the desk from the curbside mall years ago. It was discarded most likely for its obvious imperfections. 

A wobbly back leg. 

A bleached out stain that marred its beautiful mahogany.  

Still, at least as far as I am concerned, it was a love at first sight.

The corner of our living room became its permanent home. When we originally brought it into the house, I thoroughly (or so I thought) cleaned it from top to bottom, including its carved legs and all its nooks and crannies.  Since then, I’ve walked by it several times every day. Every month or so, not to appear overzealous, I remove the knick-knacks that sit on its top and dust its surface.

With years, I’ve come to know every curve and all its imperfections, and I love it all the more not in spite but because of them.

I thought I knew this desk as well as one could know an inanimate object.

Perhaps that was my downfall.

Somewhere between all this knowledge and the resulting familiarity, unbeknownst to me, grew a contempt of sort.

Just as we were about to officially announce that the egg hunt was completed, our son walked over to the desk and with a mindless gesture pulled at its decorative bottom.

Suddenly a large drawer – the size of its entire surface - slid from the desk’s underbelly!

Where did that drawer come from?!!?? 

Mom, it’s been there all along. That’s where I keep my wireless keyboard and mouse, see?

I stare at the desk, its mouth still wide open, for something like eternity.

It preaches a sermon I may not want but I need to hear.

So many times in life I think I know.

Just as I think I know my desk, I think I know myself, my family, my friends, and what life is all about. I am so thoroughly familiar with the details of the Easter story I can predict its ending!  I think I know the mind of God?!?!!! 

And somewhere between this nook of knowledge and the cranny of familiarity, I grow contemptuous.

I become jaded.

I get smug.

Been there. Done that. Yada, yada, yada. Same old. Same old.

Until God, in His infinite mercy and kindness, pulls out an entire drawer from under the desk of life.

Surprise!

And with my eyes and my mouth open wide, I squeeze out from that tight place where love withers and contempt grows and become a Bilbo Baggins of sort,  back once again on quite an unexpected journey of life.