To Know Me Is to Love Me?

I had my first kiss today. It was kind of unexpected, but I think that made it more special. I've been seeing him for a couple months now, and I finally got up the courage to hug him today. He was adorable, and he must have decided to kiss me on a whim because, with tears in his eyes, he hugged me back and kissed me - right on the cheek. I have to admit I glowed for a few minutes after. Maybe you're starting to wonder (especially since I have a husband and five children) if they have possibly finally driven me to the brink of insanity. It was my first Hospice kiss. He's 92, and I'm 32, and I'm pretty sure that the age difference is totally appropriate in this situation and didn't matter a bit to either of us. It's strange how unsure I feel of myself in new situations. I spend my life in a daily grind. Not that it never offers variety or a different set of challenges, but it rarely offers the opportunity to doubt myself. Hospice, on the other hand, has already put me in situations with many different types of people with whom I had relatively little in common. I've had to figure out how to get to know them, relate to them, help them, and even love them... but not too much.

Getting to know people is a tricky business. It's a necessity that many of us find easier to avoid. The farther along we get into technology, the more likely some of us are to retreat into a faceless void. Relationships often begin with this shiny facade called the "first impression". From that point, we try our best to keep up this facade. However, the farther we get into actually knowing others, the harder it is to keep a relationship neat and tidy. The more work a relationship takes, the less likely we are to try to maintain it... especially if we already have one or more satisfactory relationships with other people.

In a family, you can't help but get to know people down deep. I know my kids... good, bad, and ugly, and they know me the same way. Even the things I think I can hide from them, maybe even especially those things, are the things they seem to detect easily. The older three like to catch me in error. I am famous for a few things in our house. One of them is that I often absentmindedly answer questions to which I didn't listen, call the children by a sibling's (or pet's) name, and mix words together when I talk. Writing is a better medium for me. I have time to think through what I say. Maybe that's why I like it so much. My kids, like me, have a critical eye... which pays me back for my own. For example, a few weeks ago, Austin noticed that a new power line had been placed across the river on the way to my mom's house. As he mentioned it, I meant to say either, "I knew they had been working on it," or "I noticed they had been working on it." What I actually said was, "I knew-ticed they had been working on it." Well, when you make up a hybrid word like "knew-ticed", your 8th grade son is the first to start giggling (because it bears an uncanny resemblance to the word "nudist"). I've learned that there is no way to gloss over it, pretend it didn't happen, or try to keep from a full acknowledgement of the ridiculousness of what I had just said. We just laughed and joked about it, and he asked me not to say it in front of his friends.... which made me laugh harder that he thought I would want to say that in front of his friends... and as I tried to picture a context in which I would possibly start blurting things turrets-style in front of his friends.

Speaking of teenaged embarrassment... it seems to know no end. As my younger 4 children sang in front of the church on Sunday with a group of other small children, Levi, our 3 year old, became so excited to be up in front of a crowd with the whole church's attention, he had to use the opportunity to blurt. He blurted uncontrollable, unintelligible gibberish between the second and third song to a point that it became impossible to get the other children and the audience to stop laughing at him long enough to get him to stop blurting so that they could start the last song. After they finally ended the last song, Levi ran down the center aisle(gushing loudly more gibberish), realized we were seated on the side aisle, turned around, ran back up the center aisle, across the front of the church, and back down the side aisle to our seat - to the resounding chuckle of half the church. Austin was completely mortified and kept his head down repeating, "I'm not related to that kid in any way." He can't keep from knowing his brother, as much as he sometimes wishes he could.

All this talk about being associated with or not associated with (knowing or not knowing) certain people makes me think about a passage of the Bible that sometimes perplexes me.

In Matthew 7:21-23, Jesus says, ²¹"Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. ²²"Many will say to Me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?' ²³"And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; DEPART FROM ME, YOU WHO PRACTICE LAWLESSNESS.'"

In this passage Jesus tells us that, in the end, not everyone who thinks they know Him will enter the kingdom of heaven. In fact, people who have "prophesied, cast out demons, and performed miracles", all in the name of Jesus, are told by Him that He never even knew them.

The obvious question for me has always been, "God knows each of us intimately - completely (Psalm 44:21, Jeremiah 17:10, Psalm 139:1-4, 2 Kings 19:27, Job 11:11). He created us, after all, so what does Jesus mean by, "I never knew you..."? How can He know us and yet not know us?

Last week, I ended up reading in 1 Corinthians 8. "1a "...we know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge makes arrogant, but love edifies. ²If anyone supposes that he knows anything, he has not yet known as he ought to know; ³but if anyone loves God, he is known by Him." In context, Paul is talking to the Corinthians about an argument they were having with one another over whether or not to eat meat sacrificed to idols. Some were saying it was fine, and others were saying it was wrong. Paul started out by saying that the most important thing was whether or not they considered themselves as more knowledgeable than those with whom they were arguing. Obviously, there was some pride going on, and he was trying to let them know that, more important than the physical issue of eating or not eating meat sacrificed to idols, was the issue of building one another up by loving each other instead of trying to use intellect as a weapon against another Christian. They were using worldly "knowledge", in arrogance, to act superior. Paul goes on to say in verse 2 that even the fact that a person thinks he has knowledge is the first sign that he doesn't know enough to know that he doesn't know anything. The best part about this passage for me was verse 3. Paul states very simply, "But if anyone loves God, he is known by Him."

I found this to answer the question I had about Jesus sending away the "Christians" in Matthew 7:23. If we love God, then we are known by Him. I might define love as a choice to act in the best interest of another without regard to self, but it's not just that simple. You could do those things without truly knowing another's heart. Love also involves sitting quietly, communing wholly, and imbibing deeply of another. It assigns intrinsic and undeniable worth to another. Luke 10:38-42 describes two sisters - one who was doing for Jesus and one who was drinking in Jesus. Jesus told them that he preferred the actions of the latter. Ideally, acting in love toward God proceeds from a trust/belief that God's Word is true in that He "first loved us" (1 John 4:19). "Doing for" doesn't always equate to loving. Sometimes it just equates to trying to earn love... which, in the end, isn't loving the other person at all. Instead, it equates to loving self enough to try to gain the love that self wants and "deserves". "Drinking in", on the other hand, is an unselfish interest in knowing another person deeply. I think that both doing for and drinking in are essential parts of knowing and loving. In human terms, knowing someone completely can be scary. In my experience, finding out too much about a person many times makes that person less desirable, less lovable. That's where the phrase, "too much information" originated - in the thought that if I know too much about you, it will disgust me. I imagine if I knew every, little thought and detail about those around me and they knew the same about me, we would not be capable of loving one another at all. 1 Corinthians 8:3 makes it clear that God knows those who love Him. He chooses to know me and love me despite knowing all of me - good, bad, and ugly. A sweeter, more pure, more desirable love, we could not possibly know.