The more you know

Sometimes humans get stuck thinking how smart they are. Sometimes we think that we learn so much and then we have it all together. Interestingly, many of the great Saints of all time realized that the more they learned about God, the more they realized how ignorant they were. Kind of like, the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know very much.
You study astronomy and learn all the stars and feel pretty smart. Then the Hubble telescope shows us that there are billions more and we realize we are into something that is well beyond us.

A doctor goes to medical school and feels smart. But as he gets into his practice, he becomes amazed at the complexity of the human body, mind and soul. He realizes that he isn’t healing anything, he is just helping the body do what it does naturally. He comes to realize that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
Then we make a decision for Christ and we start to grow. We learn the books of the Bible, the Apostle’s creed and the Lord’s prayer. We keep studying. After a while we start to feel smart. Occasionally you will find a Christian who acts as if they have arrived. But as we delve further into the mysteries of God, something strange happens. We start to see that there is so much of Our Father that we cannot explain. We have 1,000 unanswerable questions. And we begin to see God as something immense, beyond and other.
Thomas Aquinas was a famous medieval monk. On Dec 6th 1273 he had such an intense personal encounter of Christ that he declared that everything he had ever written seemed like straw after what he had experienced.
The more we know, the more we see that we do not know. The more we know, the more thankful we are for God’s love and grace. The more we lean into our Father, the more we are overtaken by his indescribableness.
It’s a beautiful day in God’s world, be sure to see the good.