Discovery Exceeds Our Expectations

Everyone wants to discover something new and fresh. Discovery is intriguing and invigorating. Discovery reminds us that our lives are not over yet, that there is more to life than what we can see right now, and that all of us have yet-undiscovered potential.

In 1804 an expedition commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson set out on one of the greatest voyages of discovery in American history. The known regions of the United States at that time were limited to the geography east of the Mississippi—less than a third of the land mass of U.S. territory. What lay to the west, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, was a vast unknown region. The charge given to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and a few dozen men under their charge was to forge their way west, looking for a water passage all the way to the Pacific for the purpose of commerce.

Eighteen months later, the expedition had failed in that objective. There is, in fact, no waterway connecting the East and West coasts of the U.S.

That is the thing about discovery: You may never find what you expected, but what you end up discovering exceeds all expectations.

The men of the Lewis and Clark expedition were the first citizens of the newly formed country to see the vast plains and to experience their beauty and loneliness, searing heat and savage winter. They were the first to approach the Rocky Mountain range and struggle to cross it and then on to the great Pacific. They discovered countless species of wildlife and came face to face with the people of the great tribes of the West, never knowing whether the encounter would be friendly or hostile. They discovered 179 previously undocumented species of plants and trees. They encountered forty-seven tribal groups including the Pawnees, the Teton Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Tillamook. And then there were the 122 unknown species of animals, fish, and birds. Lewis and Clark tried their best to describe the grizzly bear, the coyote, the harbor seal, the steelhead trout, the prong antelope, the elk—all unknown to people back East.

What the Lewis and Clark expedition discovered was not about trade and triumph, but about the land itself. They set out to discover a means of commerce, they discovered something so much more important.

There is a spiritual analogy here. We need to see our faith as a voyage of discovery. If we think we know everything about God, everything about God’s plan for the world, everything about what he wants us to do, then we will live a very limited faith. We will not launch out. We will not take any risks. There is a vastness of God—his nature, his ways, his work done, and his work underway—yet to be discovered. We are explorers.

And we need influencers and leaders who push forward not because of what they know about the future, but because of what they hope for the future.

The book of Ecclesiastes says: “Whatever exists is far off and most profound—who can discover it? So I turned my mind to understand, to investigate and to search out wisdom and the scheme of things and to understand the stupidity of wickedness and the madness of folly” (Ecc. 7:24-25).