Reading Journal 2024: Anonymous: Jesus’ Hidden Years…and Yours

Reading Journal 2024: Anonymous: Jesus’ Hidden Years…and Yours
Author: Alicia Britt Chole

Definitely overplays its hand, moving from an intriguing premise- imagining how the fact that Jesus’ ministry didn’t arise out of nowhere, and the idea that his hidden years, the spaces that we do not know much, if anything about, contains the necessary roots of the person who’s ministry we do know much about, can be applied to our own lives much in the same way, suggesting that who are and who we are becomming is the product of the hiddden spaces and seemingly insignifcant years of our lives that we rarely give much thought to at all- to a repetitive exercise. And the more repetitive it becomes, the more aware we become of the imagination the author is employing to bring the idea to life.

And I’m not suggesting that such an imaginative exercise is bad or wrong. I actually embrace such approaches to exercises like this. It is more that the premise can only stretch so far before it loses its allure and mystery.

There was enough here though to compell me towards some reflection on my life. We often see our stories as the big, memorable events, transitions, hardships, successes. But most of our story is told from the day to day exercise of moments that do not garner our attention. In fact, it is often the case that we seek those memroable events in orer to make it seem like our life has meaning or purpose and trajectory. In truth, they rarely define us, at least not in the same way as the formative force of time and experience, even if that feels and appears to be mundane. It might not make for good fodder when it comes to telling our story, but we all would do well to spend more time thinking on and thinking about how those hidden spaces and hidden years have shaped us along our journey. It can help us undersand how and why it is that we respond to the memborable events the way we do.