Hidden progress

What is more fun then discovering a new favorite author?! I just started a book called "Anonymous" by Alicia Britt Chole. What could be better for writer's block then depending on far more accomplished authors to break through? Sometimes my progress in these studies is so slow and the new meaning so hidden, I am about to give up and then...a passage clicks together.
In studying Jesus' relationships with people, we've landed in between His birth and His baptism, Luke 2:41-52... So many hidden years of Jesus' early childhood! As the author points out: Jesus' birth was followed by hidden days, His circumcision by hidden months, His visit from the wise men by hidden years and His visit to Jerusalem by hidden decades. What did thirty years of living in obscurity, thirty years of waiting to step into His life mission, accomplish in Jesus?
These questions and this passage lead to a detested word: submission.
Submission- A choice to place one's own agenda under someone else's authority, someone else's needs, someone else's desires. Which, don't get me wrong, at times can be a bad thing. But for Jesus, it was all good.
Jesus' hidden years were lived in submission to His parents. In an environment of love (evidenced in His parents frantic, three-day search for Him) and His parents' own submission to God (evidenced through His birth story) Jesus grew in His ability to say: "Not my will but Thine". The Creator of time, took time.
At twelve, He was so wise He amazed everyone at the Temple yet returned for another twenty years to live with His parents (is He relevant or what?!) But it wasn't for His needs that He moved back in, it was to submit to their needs. At 30+, Jesus finally stepped out and into His ultimate mission and submitted to His Father's agenda to meet our deepest needs: to be set free from the power of sin and to be restored back into true worshippers of the true God.
Jesus' practice of obscurity, His choice to submit, turned the destiny of the world upside down and restored the ultimate agenda for all of us.
What could be more fun then discovering our new, our ultimate purpose?
What could be better for a "life-block", than depending on the One who breaks every chain?
But it takes time. Sometimes the progress lies hidden, obscure.
Be encouraged today, The Son of God Himself took 30+ years!