We have a deep secret we all carry around. And I don’t mean a dark secret, as in something we don’t want to tell anyone, but a secret that is hard to name.

Sometimes it positively gnaws at us and draws to the fore, especially when we are struggling with relationships or conflicts, with grief and loss, or major transitions in our life. For some of us, spiritual hunger and curiosity might be a constant drive in itself: How is it all connected? How am I connected? How do I fit?

The phrase “The Far Off Country” speaks to me of that secret, which I think at its core is a desire to feel known, to feel home.

You and I are made to experience a reality that is so brim with freedom and pleasure, with peace and satisfaction, but we often dare not ask or think we deserve it. It is what I call home.

C.S. Lewis once wrote of this same reality as as the “inconsolable secret.”

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.”

Beautiful, right? What does that make you think about or imagine?

…

I’d probably take a step further than Lewis and suggest our country is a mystery glaring right in our faces.

This is the reality that the early Christian father and apostle Paul called “the great mystery of Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

It’s good news. It was called “good news” for a reason.

But here’s the thing: most of us have heard only bad news, or jaded news. Or the news that something good once happened and now it’s a matter of putting it into practice through toil and sweat and lament, through “digging deep” to uproot the dark side. Or the news that hope is way over there in the great yonder after we die. But let’s be honest—does any of that sound good to you?

There’s a reason St. Paul called this great mystery a “skandalon,” the Greek word for scandal. And oh, is it scandalous as all get out. It has no place in polite society. The soon-to-be-apostle was blinded, literally, by it. That suggests our eyesight is accustomed to the wrong thing.

That’s my mission—to help you unwrap the great secret and discover how good the mystery really is!

Amy