Knowing and not knowing

As I approached the city of Seattle this morning on my commute in, my work building and some of the other taller buildings’ tops were hidden by the marine layer. I could only see about ¾ of my work building and yet I had certainty that the rest of the building was there. This made me think of faith and how I believe in a God that I have never seen but I have the certainty in my heart that He not only exists but that He loves me.


Faith is defined in Hebrews 11:1 as “…the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”.


After pondering the mystery of the marine mist for a moment more I returned to my book. The next part that I read gave me chills as it perfectly coincided with what I had just been thinking. The chapter is titled knowing and not knowing. The passage that just really hit me was: “Great spirituality is always seeking a balance between opposites, a very subtle but creative balance. As William Johnston once said, ‘Faith is the breakthrough into that deep realm of the soul which accepts parable with humility.’ When you go to one side or the other too much, you find yourself either overly righteous or overly skeptical and cynical. There must be a healthy middle…as we try to hold both the needed light and the necessary darkness”.


It hit me that, more times than not, I get caught up in finding the answers to the BIG questions and thus end up being overly righteous. It is a constant battle for me to just say that I don’t know. To understand and acknowledge that God’s mind is beyond mine and that I am not sure of the WHY. I so count on reason and intelligence to get me through when really the only thing that will truly rescue me is faith.

John Donne said that “Reason is our soul's left hand, Faith her right. We need them both. 


It is easy for me to admit that I do not have all the answers. What is continually hard for me to accept is that I may never find those answer or that they are beyond my understanding. Thinking is my hobby, the thing I love most to do, and to accept that I cannot think my way through to some resolution, some standpoint, to some substantial answer, that is humbling and often disconcerting. Yet humility is what Jesus was all about. Most times He did not give answers but responded to a question with a parable or another question. He wanted people to wrestle with things and to have faith. Matthew tells us that Jesus said that if we could just have faith in the amount of a mustard seed we could move mountains, that nothing was impossible.


So my Monday finds me at peace in my office. I have already been up to the 40th floor, above the mist, and guess what, that part of the building that I could not see from the street, exists.