Are You Ready to Solve a Mystery?

“Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.”
— Psalm 119:18

This week at Boss, we had a “mystery” of sorts come up when one of Dan’s daughters and her husband had their roof reshingled. The work was complete, and yet there were still quite a few bundles of shingles sitting on the roof.

Why?

The figures had been done by a contractor. The calculations had been made. So WHY were there so many leftovers?

Long story short, the mystery was solved when it was realized that the square-footage calculations included the ridge cap and a few other areas that required different materials than the shingles.

(I was listening when all of this was explained, but I missed a few parts whenever I walked into another area of the shop—or Dan’s daughter moved farther away from my engraving room. 😬)

As the story was wrapping up, someone made the comment:

“Don’t you just love a good mystery?”

And the reply came quickly:

“NO! Well…yes. I like mystery books and shows, but the ones where the mystery is solved at the end. I don’t like the ones that keep you hanging and never give you an answer.”

That brought a chuckle from the one Boss employee who listens to true crime and is forever being left hanging by missing-person cases and unsolved murders.

(The rest of the shop does not allow those to be played over the surround-sound speakers.)

All of that brings us back to our verse this week:

“Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.”

If you have ever read through the Bible in a year—or simply spent time regularly reading Scripture—you have probably had one of those moments when you come across a passage you KNOW you have read many times before, and suddenly it jumps off the page.

It feels like a brand-new thought.

You wonder, How did I never see that before?

Or maybe you have been fervently praying for an answer, asking God to show you what to do, and suddenly a passage you know you have read before speaks directly into the very thing you have been praying about.

Then there is my absolute favorite: when you are talking with a friend and they begin sharing something from their devotions, Scripture reading, a podcast, or something God has been showing them. Their joy and excitement starts bubbling over, and suddenly what became a “lightbulb moment” for them becomes one for you too.

It’s incredible.

That is one of the things I love about the Bible.

In a way, it reminds me of a mystery novel—but maybe the best kind of mystery novel. We already know the ending. We know who wins. Yet there are still things waiting for us to discover along the way.

Not because Scripture keeps changing, but because sometimes we do.

We grow. We experience things we had never experienced before. We ask different questions. We walk through different seasons. And a verse we once read quickly can suddenly become exactly what we needed to hear.

Maybe that is why the psalmist prayed, “Open my eyes.”

The words were already there.

He was asking God to help him truly see them.

And maybe that is a prayer worth praying before we ever open our Bible:

Lord, open my eyes. Show me what You want me to see today.

Of course, there are also times when we need to be cautious about what someone claims to have “discovered” in Scripture. If your friend tries to tell you that the young boy who shared his bread and fish simply inspired everyone else in the crowd to share their food—and that Jesus did not actually perform the miracle of multiplying the loaves and fish—well…

That might be a good time to open John 6:1–14 together. 😬

There is a difference between discovering something in Scripture that we had never noticed before and changing Scripture into something it never said.

But that should not make us afraid to keep looking.

There are still wondrous things to behold.

We just have to keep asking God to open our eyes.