“The immense success of our life is, I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it.” Virginia Woolf, Diaries, June 14, 1925
Where does your treasure lie? If we believe everything we watch on TV, or in the magazines that call to us at the Supermarket check-out, our treasure would lie in eternal youth. Shiny bright perfection, a job to die for, a bulging diary of fabulous people and events, always happiness.
Whenever we can, we slip away to an old, old place that hasn’t changed for centuries. The wild animals haven’t been fenced into an over sized petting zoo, the rocks haven’t been removed to make someone’s bathroom, apart from the occasional lone rabbit the landscape is still. It doesn’t want, it doesn’t wait, it is just as it always has been. Hidden treasure.
You don’t get up there easily. You have to turn off the road to the shopping malls, leave your Must Do List behind along with your Must Haves. You wouldn’t know that bright and super-busy C21st life existed up there, except when it gets dark and you can just make out a faint band of light on the far horizon that marks the sky over the city far, far away.
Being there makes me think about hidden treasure, or treasure so common that nothing can touch it. What we are when you take away our Must Dos and our Must Haves. What we are actually about. What is just stuff and what the real stuff is.
I hear the still, gentle voice of God on the evening breeze up there. Amongst the granite and the broken down walls that tell of other times, other lives. I AM. He is the treasure of our lives that is hidden away, and the treasure so common that nothing can touch it.
He is in the hidden places that no one else can see. He is in the times when you think nobody is listening, or that nobody understands. He is in the times when you cannot, and the times when you will not. He is in the building and the re-making. He is in the trying and the failing. He is in your doubt, your uncertainty. He is in the beginnings and the endings.
He is in the common things that no one can touch. The kind words, the words unsaid but meant. He is in your pleasure, your favorites, and your comfort. He is in the small things that make the difference. The photographs, the songs and the laughter. He is in the morning and the evening.
I hear the still, gentle voice of God on the evening breeze up there. Amongst the granite and the broken down walls that tell of our treasured times, our hidden times, our common times. I AM. He is just as He has always been. Right here. With you, not against you.
This is treasure that lasts.
He believes in you.