Have you ever studied the topic of ‘messiology’? It has a ring to it. It is the study of how life is full of mess, how all of history is full of mess. How messes describe so much of what you and I experience day to day. Unless you’re different and somehow just plain more blessed than the rest of us. And yes, we are in a new year and there continue to be messes around us.

I’ve been reading a little book with an interesting title recently. It is Messiology, by George Verwer. In case you were wondering, Verwer made up this word, so there really isn’t a subject like this you can study. George Verwer founded a sister organization to the one I’ve spent over four decades with. He passed away in 2023. It is called Operation Mobilization, and they were founded just a few years before YWAM who I work with. George was one of my favorite mission leaders, and I have read several of his books over the years. I had heard of this one but never read it.

The subtitle of this book also really attracted me. It is: ‘The mystery of how God works even when it doesn’t make sense to us.‘ There is a lot of mystery in messiology. I’m sure everyone reading this post has at least one situation in their life that doesn’t make sense. It might be in your personal life, something you’ve longed and lamented for change. But nothing seems to ever happen. In your family, someone you love makes one tragic choice after another. You can only watch and continue loving them. Or it may be your nation, or in the travails of the planet we live on.

So much mystery around us. Every mess has its own mystery. Verwer himself defines messiology this way: ‘the idea that God in His patience, mercy, and passion brings men and women to Himself‘, and ‘often does great things in the midst of a mess.‘ I call this ‘redemptive grace’- that no matter how bad things seem, God is indeed at work in a redemptive way, that has restoration and hope at its heart. This happens in mysterious and often silent and hidden ways. I do believe in prayer, but for me it is so much about trust. As I sometimes regularly commit a person or situation to prayer, it is a matter of holding them before the Lord in trust.

Often in the mess we don’t know how to pray. But the idea of ‘messiology’ as Verwer defines it is that things are happening in ways we just can’t see or understand. One of my favorite spiritual writers recently wrote that sometimes we need to define faith more as trust. Yes, it does involve beliefs, but so much of faith is holding on in trust.

Going into this new year of 2025, there are many messes. It is okay to be honest and say that. It is not a violation of positivity or optimism. Because when we can face that there are messes, then we can enter the realm of hope and trust. What I have sometimes called ‘hope beyond hope’. Where we find the end of human hope and enter a hope that comes from the God in the mess.

Anyone want to do a degree in ‘messiology’? Probably many of us have been in enough messes to feel we have earned plenty of credits. Keep going, and find again the God of hope beyond hope in the mess.