What I Don’t Know

Don’t worry.  It’s not an exhaustive list.  We do not have space enough or time.

You ever read something and feel like everything you know or knew just doesn’t cut it?

I’m motivated by a line from one of the best book’s I’ve read, during an arc in the narrative that cut through my flesh like a knife cuts through heated butter: “I  do not understand one thing in this world.  Not one.”

It’s a liberating and emphatic admission.  Here are a few lines from books that made me announce the sentiment this week:

“For Who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him?”  In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence.  Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable — which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.  We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity.  But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

- John Ames, in Gilead

“Our motive for surrender should not be for any personal gain at all.  We have become so self-centered that we go to God only for something from Him, and not for God Himself.”

- Read the whole devotion on Surrender from Mr. O.

True abiding consists of two parts: occupying a position into which Christ can come and abide, and abiding in Him so that the soul lets Him take the place of the self to become our life.

- Andrew Murray in With Christ in the School of Prayer

Love is like grace — the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.

- John Ames in Gilead

Tagged as: Andrew Murray, Gilead, Marilynne Robinson, my utmost for his highest, oswald chambers, With Christ in the School of Prayer