Discovery

The news of the last week about vaccines has brought great joy to many I’m sure. I marvel at the ability of the people involved in the discovery of a new vaccine. It is simply beyond my understanding. We are of course, being told that this is not the end of COVID-19. Not yet at least. And maybe not ever. We may have to live with the virus. But we will have a vaccine. And most likely not just one, but two or three or more. We’ve already put in our order for millions of the ones we believe are effective. The NHS have even asked the church if we could provide a room from which they can administer the injections for 12 hours a day, seven days a week until this time next year! That’s what it will take evidently. My mind boggles. What a discovery. It is literally a life changing one. Or series of discoveries. But then life is a discovery isn’t it? Aren’t we discovering all the time? Isn’t that how we grow and learn? Don’t we go from one discovery to another? Granted we might not always be discovering things that have never been discovered before. But they are new to us. And, it seems to me that it is important for us to discover things for ourselves. It’s great that someone else has already made a discovery, but there are things we need to discover for ourselves. Take faith for example. Other people have discovered faith a long time before us. The Bible is a gold mine of stories of people discovering faith. Take Abraham for example. He is told to leave everything he knows by God whom he barely knows. This will be a journey of discovery! He is promised he will be the father of a great nation when both he and his wife are beyond child bearing years. This will be a journey of discovery. Years after his son was born, God asked him to sacrifice him on an altar (Josephus states Isaac would have been about 25 years old by this time). At the last moment, God provides a lamb for the sacrifice. That would have been some journey of discovery don’t you think? For both Abraham and Isaac. And the first three generations of the family that would became the nation of Israel came though childless couples. A challenging journey of discovery. The story of Abraham is one of many. many stories of discovery in the Bible. And all the stories are about discovering who God really is. Only in the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus in the New Testament do we fully discover who God is. We have all that to look back on. We have all those discoveries to learn from. And yet. And yet, we must walk our own journey of discovery with God. We must find our own faith. We must experience our own doubt. We must face our own challenges. And we must discover who God really is for ourselves. Sometimes we have moments of breakthrough, like discovering a vaccine. Lockdown and the challenges we face right now may be the birthplace of discovery in our journey of faith. Discoveries are really, really important. They bring change. The discovery of a vaccine is really, really important. It will bring change. But it will only bring change for this life. The journey of discovery with God is life changing. It is a journey of discovery that affects eternity.