There is much in this world that is worthy of deeper study where there is more than meets the eye. Of course, there are some aspects of this world where the surface is all that exists, and where there is nothing deeper to uncover, something which I tend to find rather disappointing. For the most part, while I appreciate that which is simple as long as it is good, my own personality tends to deal mainly with the intricate and with those things that are complicated and tangled. Whether this is good or bad depends largely on the specific situation, I suppose. Fortunately, my life tends to provide a great many opportunities to poke and prod and examine the deeper meanings of people, places, and things.

One of the perks of my life over the past few years has been a greater appreciation for places. For most of my life, I have been the sort of person whose travels tended to lead me to go to places largely for a small amount of things, to seek out those destinations, and then to leave. Just about every place, even a fairly small town, often has more than meets the eye, though, and requires at least a little bit of investigation. Simply racing from point A to point B does not allow one to gain an appreciation of the reasons why people live in, work in, or play in particular locations. We are often so interested in our own persuits that we do not see locations and places the same way. For example, once while on a road trip with some family members I navigated a path that was significantly out of a straight shot so I could see two places: the Moore’s Creek Battlefield site and Fort Fisher, both in North Carolina. Moore’s Creek is a lovely forest near a small creek with a bridge that happened to be a particularly important battle in the early part of the Revolutionary War, providing the patriots with a major victory against a royalist army. Likewise, Fort Fisher’s fall closed the last major port open to the Confederacy in early 1865, leading rapidly to logistics problems for the overmatched rebel army.

Just like places, there is more than meets the eye when it comes to people. The deepest and most interesting parts of people’s lives may be hidden deep within. There are a lot of people, including people I care deeply about, who I would not know as well or care as deeply for if we had not had the opportunity to chat online, because life has seldom provided us the opportunity to speak face to face all that long or all that much. My life would be immeasurably poorer if all I had to base my understanding of others on was that which was obvious and superficial. I suspect the same would be true of others with regards to me. There is much more going on inside of our hearts and minds than we have the time or skill to articulate, and if tha tis true for someone as prolific at expression as I am, it is certainly true to an even greater extent to those who lack the time or the compulsive expressiveness that I possess. To the extent that we are interested in taking the time to explore someone, we reap the benefits of a much greater appreciation of what makes them tick, and their purpose in our lives and the gifts that God has given them. Our recognition of those gifts is good for us as well as others.

When we spend a lot of time around someone or in a place, we can get complacent and think that we know it well. Sometimes we need to be reminded that there is more than meets the eye, that there is greater depth to life than we are accustomed to seeing, and that even those people, places, and things that may seem familiar to us are full of quirks and intricacies that we have not simply paid attention to or come across yet. So long as we are able to appreciate the world around us and to recognize that we do not know or have not seen all that there is to know or see, we can learn and improve our understanding and appreciation of what we come into contact with. This only makes us better at appreciating others, and makes life more enjoyable by providing greater depth of understanding to what might otherwise appear dull and boring.