Expecting the Unexpected

When Laura Young paid $34.99 for a white marble bust at a Goodwill in Austin, Texas, several years ago, she was pleased with her discovery: "I was just looking for anything that looked interesting," she said. She never would have guessed that her 52-pound living room decor is actually a 2,000-year-old sculpture of the ancient Roman military leader Sextus Pompey.

Curiosity led Young to begin researching the bust last year, and she was soon put in contact with Sotheby's, which confirmed that the bust is estimated to be some 2,000 years old and a remarkable resemblance of same-era portraits and coins of Sextus Pompey.

In the early 1900s, the bust was displayed in a replica of a Pompeii home known as Pompejanum in Ashaffenburg, Germany, and was moved into storage just before the building was destroyed during World War II. Collectors believe that a U.S. soldier may have stolen in the bust in the 1950s and brought it to the United States, which is how it ended up in an Austin-area thrift store in 2018.

Since Young's realization last year, the bust has been on display at the San Antonio Museum of Art. Next month, the bust will be transported to its permanent home in the Glyptothek, a museum in Munich, Germany, that houses an extensive collection of Greek and Roman statues.

For Young, the finding is both startling and a little bittersweet, as she will now need to travel to Germany to visit her statue. And as Young learned in a remarkable way, we should never underestimate the possibility of discovery.

Consider the metaphor, Friends: Do we live our lives expecting the expected, fatigued by the ordinary and wondering why the magical moments always seem to happen to others? Or do we live each day ready to discover an ancient Roman statue on the shelf of Goodwill, or a species of bird we've never seen outside our window, or a new friend in our community whose very presence awakens new ideas? 

By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
    their starry host by the breath of his mouth. -- Psalm 33:6

Let us live lives expecting the Lord to connect dots in ways we could never imagine, bringing us surprise and delight as we learn to recognize the constancy of his presence.

Blessings on your week,

Jennie