Hidden in Plain Sight: The Secret of More - Softcover

Buchanan, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0849964652 ISBN 13: 9780849964657

Publisher: Thomas Nelson, 2012

Synopsis

Same great content, now with new cover. Ever feel stuck? That no matter how much you wish otherwise, how hard you try and pray and regret and resolve, you can't break certain habits? Old wounds keep reopening. Old fears keep resurfacing. Don't you want more than that? And doesn't God want more for you? That's whatHidden in Plain Sight is about: finding and having more--more purpose, more passion, more life, more of what God intended for you. Widely acclaimed author Mark Buchanan shares with readers a treasure from scripture that the vast majority of us overlook, a treasure that has been hidden in plain sight, that can finally move us beyond our old life and into a brand new life.

About this title

About the Author:

Mark Buchanan is a pastor, award-winning author, and father of three who lives with his wife, Cheryl, on the West Coast of Canada. Educated at the University of British Columbia and Regent College, his work has been published in numerous periodicals, including Christianity Today, Books and Culture, Leadership Journal, and Discipleship Magazine. He is the author of six books: Your God Is Too Safe, Things Unseen, The Holy Wild, The Rest of God, Hidden in Plain Sight, and Spiritual Rhythm.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Preface
Come in Here with Me

I went spelunking last summer with my daughter Nicola, 9-years old at the time, and 40 of her classmates. Spelunking is cave exploring. Spelunking means you find some pleat in earth's crust and slither, lizard-like, into it. You thread your way down shafts narrow as the grave, shimmy your way up holes tights as chimney flues. You emerge into vaults and caverns hidden forever from sun and wind, hewn by the brute violence of tectonics, the solemn patience of melting ice, the slow burnish of trickling water.

I didn't think I'd be up for it. I suffer mild claustrophobia, and can easily relive the terror of a childhood event when my brother and his friend locked me in a trailer's closet. I panicked. I rammed my shoulder against the thin mahogany door, splintered it off its hinges. The trailer belonged to the parents of my brother's friend, and he stood to catch trouble for the damage. I couldn't have cared less.

So spelunking held no initial charm. To enter one cave I had to flatten my body to a knife blade, insert it between a thin cleft of rock, and step into the underworld's thick silence and thicker darkness. I picked my way down a staircase of boulders. I descended twisting chutes, squeezed between narrowing shafts, shoehorned myself through rock eyelets, duck walked damp tunnels. The trail led nowhere, just further in, deeper down.

Why did I come?

It was unclear at first. I came to test something, to prove something, to overcome something. I came to see things daylight can't produce. I came because it's shameful to fear the dark at my age. I came because my daughter and her classmates needed me in some vague, loose way, and I couldn't let them down. Nor let them show me up.

And what did I discover?

Beauty beyond imagining. Stalactites long and sharp as Zeus's thunderbolts. Stalagmites tall and jagged as tigerpit stakes. Snowy-white cascades of calcite. Filigrees of encrusted mineral. Exotic rock sculptures finessed by seepage, as though by fingertips, over eons. And then, when all the lights turned out, a blackness so complete it is one of the few holy and perfect things I've touched in this unholy, imperfect world.

 

This is a book about practicing virtue, which at first may seem -- it did to me -- a descent into something narrow and dark and enclosing, a world without wind, without open spaces where weather dances its varied moods. The word virtue almost made me claustrophobic. By temperament and against better instinct, I still have moments where I think the good life is seeking my own pleasure at my own convenience, and so the very thought of practicing virtue chafed me. I pictured Victorian women bound in corsets. I pictured Mormon boys in starched white shirts and crisp ties, earnestly soliciting at the door. I pictured primness and stiffness and pursed lips and arched eyebrows.

I never imagined life to the full.

But that's what I'm discovering: a world vast, and beautiful, and holy, and that all along has been hidden in plain sight.

Why don't you come in here with me, and see for yourself?

About this edition

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0849964652
• ISBN 13: 9780849964657
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240