Grace and Knowledge

I've always wanted to know things. I blame my education, specifically AP and the College Board. Every April I read pages upon pages of review books, textbooks, online outlines, and my own notes, in order to be fully coherent in a certain subject for which I will be tested in for four hours straight. There are hours and hours of notecards and post-its. The only thing desired out of that month of my life is that I can list off presidents, vps, political parties, terms in office, policies, kinetic energy equations, F=ma, syntax, diction, parallelism... There's never too much studying for AP classes.

And so that craving for knowledge, for passing, for high test scores because of these facts that I know, it kind of became how I looked at growing spiritually. It was always "oh, if only I just knew more about God, then it'd all make sense." I want wisdom and knowledge and to be profound effortlessly. I listened to a Francis Chan podcast where he said that God lets us know some of the stuff about Him, but some other stuff is kept secret, because we can't handle it.

And truthfully, my thoughts were "What is there I can't handle? If I just knew it, I'd be able to handle life so much more. If I could just know everything about God, then life would make sense."

And so, in my craving to know even the secrets God keeps for Himself, I bought Crazy Love by Francis Chan, still hoping that I could wrap my head around it all.

Well, he has this video on crazylovebook.com called "The Awe Factor," and in chapter one, he urges the reader to go watch it. So I did. And it's this crazy video about how ridiculously small the earth (and consequently, we) is/are in view of the universe. And not the whole universe, but just the universe that we know about so far.

It was kind of one of those things I shrugged off. I mean, I was definitely affected by how big and great this God I worship is, but I went back to Spanish homework.

And it wasn't until I was lying in bed at 11:30 unable to sleep. Pitch black. My ipod wouldn't turn on. Nothing.

And I was just overwhelmed with how vast God is. And how little I am. And how I don't want to know those secrets about God anymore. Offer them to me and I'll fling them away and flee. Not because I don't love God and don't want to know him greater. But because I know that I can't handle it. If I did know, or began to know, I'd die. Literal, physical, dead death.

And so I kind of just tried to push God away. I didn't know what else to do. "Get away from me, I'm so unworthy and unholy and cold and sinful and hot and shivering and get these blankets off me. Restless. I need sleep. Just, I can't, please, I..."



Today I listened to my ipod while I was washing my car. Mostly background noise. And You're Everything played twice in a row, at some odd coincidence. So the second time I listened.

If I could see that You want me, could I believe?

And I couldn't move. My mind was screaming to just run away and lose myself in the footsteps, or shove my keys into the ignition and weave my way through traffic until I got so far that I didn't remember why I started in the first place. But my hand was stuck to the roof, my left hand in mid swing to wipe my bangs from my eyes.

I didn't want to move. I didn't think I could. I didn't want to move. I didn't think I should.

He wants me? He loves me? Even though I'm just a speck in His universe that I don't even know how much of there is? Even though I'm scum compared to his glory? Even know simple knowledge of Him would kill me?

Whoa.