Fasting from Knowing

Our brains are meant to learn. We know this is the purpose of our cerebral organ. It's very structure is based on the absorption and process of information. We have all heard about studies showing how children's brains more easily sort information (like languages), and we are strongly advised to challenge our adult brains with new knowledge in order to keep our mental muscles firing on all cylinders.

Knowledge in and of itself is not an enemy. However, when we are in the crossfire of our own sin nature and our real enemy, Satan, we will grasp for knowledge like a flotation device. Knowledge is power. Knowledge is peace. Knowledge is the key to life. As Dr. Seuss said, "The more you read, the more you know, and the more you know, the more places you go."

This means knowledge is everything. Essentially, knowledge is our god. Perhaps this is why the only tree off limits in the Garden of Eden was called The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Our lust for knowledge continues to grow faster and wider with every era. Beginning with Greek philosophers, Plato and Socrates, the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Discovery, the Scientific Revolution, The Industrial Revolution, The Progressive Era, and now the Information Age... every period in human history has sought increased knowledge.

Has anyone ever stopped to ask why we have such an insatiable lust for knowing? I wrote a dissertation on "Creating Lifelong Learners," so I'm clearly a strong proponent of continuing our knowledge through education. We need not demonize knowing, but recognize our potentially inappropriate relationship to it.

In the same way that we don't give up food forever, yet fast for purposeful reasons, we also mustn't give up knowledge forever, but consider a fast. Ask good questions, seek to understand, grow in knowledge and wisdom, but at some point, fasting from it is as healthy for your soul and reorients your relationship to it.

God had to give me a forcible shaking from being "in the know." He took me on a roller coaster of unknowns. From not knowing if I'd ever marry or have kids, to merely not knowing the gender of my kids. From not knowing how to solve my son's disabilities, to living without knowing where we would sleep, who or even how we would get to the next place on the map. Not knowing the next phase these past few years has been extremely challenging for my planning personality, but it's opened me up to new and true freedom that I never imagined before now.

Tim Keller said it best in a novel critique, "A God who supported our plans, how we thought the world and history should go. That is a God of our own creation, a counterfeit god. Such a god is really just a projection of our own wisdom, of our own self. In that way of operating, God is our “accomplice,” someone to whom we relate as long as he is doing what we want. If he does something else, we want to “fire” him, or “unfriend him,” as we would any personal assistant who was insubordinate or incompetent. But in the very end, [the character of Elliot’s novel] realizes that the demise of her plans shatters our false god, and now she is free for the first time to worship the True One. When serving the god-of-my-plans, she had been extraordinarily anxious. She had never been sure that God was going to come through for her and ‘get it right.’ She was always trying to figure out how to bring God to do what she had planned. But she had not really been treating him as God—as the all-wise, all-good, all-powerful one. Now she had been liberated to put her hope not in her agendas and plans but in God himself. In short, suffering had pointed her to a glorious God, and it had taught her to treat him as such." (commentary on Elizabeth Elliot's No Graven Image as quoted in Being Elizabeth Elliot, by Ellen Vaughn).

None of us has ever truly known anything about the future unless through God's grace He has revealed it to us through His omniscient Spirit. "He changes times and seasons; he deposes kings and raises up others. He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the discerning.He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with Him." (Daniel 2:21-22) We have liked to pretend we know what's next, but it's been a figment of our plans that sometimes coincide with His. Once we stop treating God as an accomplice to our goals, we'll be free to serve the True God who has better callings for us than any plan we could have set.

Continuing in the unknown doesn't get easier, it just gets more familiar.

~Carefully & Carelessly Knowing