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What I write about—like this article—comes from research, study, and personal experience. It’s mostly about life and how we can go about living it better. But to do that, we need to know what we’re working with, and it’s not all good:
- Life will always have trials and troubles. Some will be of our own making, but others come about because sometimes bad things happen that we may never fully understand.
- We all choose idols instead of God at times. We all have issues, and we are all addicted to something. But it often takes us a while to become aware of some of those areas.
- As much as we want to run our own life, there is much of it we simply cannot control.
With all that bad news, what are we to do? Hang onto our hope and faith, because that’s where God comes in.
Learning What We Don’t Know
Frankly, I can’t imagine life without God anymore.
And this is coming from someone who went more than 35 years not really thinking about God much at all. Not that I was against the concept of God. I went to church growing up, and I don’t remember ever specifically choosing to turn away from spirituality. I just had other things to do, mostly for myself, and I didn’t see the point.
Back then, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
But in my late 30’s, I found myself in engaged in what I now realize was a “Search for Truth.” I started reading books about God and the Bible to fill in the gaps of what I didn’t know. That new knowledge continued to add up until, at one point, I said to my wife, “If all of this is really true, doesn’t that change everything?” It does, and my whole view of the world did change.
Many people are intelligent and successful in the eyes of the world. They like being in control and having people see them as capable. But there are often gaps in their knowledge of how life really works. They don’t know what they don’t know.
Now, I know what I don’t know. For example, I don’t know how God does all that he does. I don’t know why he does certain things and doesn’t do other things. But what I don’t know doesn’t bother me anymore, and it doesn’t affect my well-being.
What We Know About God
What matters now is what I do know about God. Because that has made all the difference in what life is like and how I want to live it. It is a whole new worldview that is intensely personal and wonderfully transcendental at the same time.
I know God is good and that he created us and is in control of all things. He loves us so intensely that he sent his Son to earth to live and die for us. And I know that by trusting him as our Lord and Savior, our past is forgiven and our future assured.
That’s what we know about God. And knowing those things changes everything:
- Even though we continually turn away from God, he still loves us and pursues us.
- We can learn to set aside idols, deal with issues, and recover from addictions.
- We will never be perfect, and there will be trials, but life can be very good.
- It’s actually much better that we don’t control everything in our life.
What we know about God makes all the difference, and I can’t imagine life any other way.
