Faith begins where knowledge ends

One scripture that has stuck with me from early on is 1 Corinthians 8:1: “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” Someone can know all the right answers and still miss the point, because life is about far more than knowing things or understanding. God is bigger than anyone’s brain can hold, and if we forget that, we can spend our whole lives striving toward a dead end.

As the old saying goes, “the mark of a good education is knowing what you don’t know.”

To know God is to know what we don’t know. It is to stand in the presence of things we can’t understand. It is to stake one’s life on the promise that “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived — what God has prepared for those who love him.” (1 Cor. 2:9). It is how we stay humble in this life and leave God to do the lifting rather than thinking too highly of ourselves and leaving God to do the humbling.

What this means for everyday life is to see with fresh eyes the things we might take for granted, to pay attention to the things we often overlook, and to appreciate God’s presence in the things we don’t control.

I do not give my heart permission to beat, for example. It is a gift not of my own making, so every heartbeat becomes an opportunity to be grateful. I can open or close my eyes, but I cannot make them see, so every blink becomes an opportunity to praise God from whom all blessings flow. We can plant crops, water them, fertilize and weed them, but we ourselves do not make them grow, so every bite we eat reminds us it is the hand of God that feeds us every day.

A conversation in prison drove this point home for me in a way I will never forget.

I was invited to worship ten years ago in a maximum security unit with men who will never be released, and I heard one man stand up and pray with gratitude: “I have a head start on everyone else in this world, because I’ve already lost everything. I know I need God and that I am nothing without him.” When this knowledge yielded to God’s love, not even concrete, steel, and condemnation could separate this man from the love of God, nor could anything else in all creation tear down what that love was building.

What I have learned in dark places continues to feed me in the brightest light.

Even the deepest losses in my life have taught me to take nothing for granted but to welcome every step and every breath as a gift from God to be cherished. As a father, the more deeply I know my children, the more awake I become to God’s daily surprises in them. As a spouse, the love we share leads us to discover as much about ourselves as we learn about each other over the years.

The gifts we have in God, each other, and life itself run far deeper than we can ever know, and it is through love and a sense of awe that we can see those gifts most clearly. That is the light that shines in the darkness without being overwhelmed. It is a well that will never run dry.

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Rev. John Harrison is the pastor of Nacoochee Presbyterian Church in Sautee Nacoochee, located at 260 GA-Hwy 255 North. Visit them online at nacoocheepresbyterian.org.