"I Don't Know"

A great and incredibly gifted (in countless ways) friend of mine, D'Nae Reber wrote this and I wanted to share it with you...

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase, "I don't know."“ (Why these moments of inspiration or revelation always seem to hit in the middle of math or chemistry, I’m not sure, but so it is. For some reason looking at letters and numbers together stimulates my mind and spirit to go abstract. Thus we end up with what shall be on this screen. ;-))
So many written pages are surface level. I don’t desire to go merely surface level, spreading broadly across yet going nowhere. In my short 18 years of life I’ve seen enough surface-level to last a lifetime; some written by others, some by me. My desire in what I write, and even especially in what I think, is to go beyond the surface, the normal, the expected, and the spiritually cliché. If I write well, great, but that’s not my point. My point is to take a bit of depth and spur the readers on to greater depths. After all, the greatest honor of a leader is for those led to surpass him or her. So if what I write ever seems surface level or cliché, please look deeper, harder, if you will, and find the deeper meaning, or search one out yourself. Words on a page do little good if they do not inspire action.
Now back to the topic at hand.

I heard a speaker say the other day, in general paraphrase, “..a move of God is coming that is so different from what the church has seen and expected that we’re going to have to learn to say, ‘I don’t know!’”
Think about that. I mean really think about it. God doing things we haven’t seen and don’t expect. So much of what we see God do now we expect of Him, and because we’ve seen it before, we try to understand and explain it.
But what do we see if we look at God’s history, starting at the time of Jesus?

-When the Son of God manifested Himself, it wasn’t how the people expected. They expected a physical king, and Jesus was a demon-removing, controversy-causing, parable-speaking man who was raised as a carpenter in the middle of ghetto Israel.
-When the Holy Spirit manifested Himself at Pentecost, it wasn’t how people had ever seen before. There was no previous Biblical account to match His current coming with past physical manifestations. Yet He was obvious, as tongues of fire leapt above the disciples’ heads, and one of His signature sounds, the sound of a might rushing wind, swept through the closed room. That’s probably not what they were expecting.
-When Peter’s ministry began, I’m sure it’s not what had been seen before. And there was no previous account to back it up against when he laid hands on a handkerchiefs and those who touched them were healed.(that may have been Paul, but the point remains)
-What about when rooms of people were suddenly prophesying to each other? That had only happened(or at least been recorded) in the days of the prophets Elijah, Elisha, and Samuel. That probably wasn’t expected as a result of the Holy Spirit’s ministry through people and on people.
-Or what about the time when all the witches and sorcerers of the city got together and burned everything they owned relating to witchcraft? Was that expected? Had it been done before? And yet it was definitely a move of God.

“I don’t know.” Such a simple phrase, and yet such a hard one to say about spiritual things. Especially as a church-grown homeschooler. Why? This is my explanation of the answer to that question, based off my own experience.

When one grows up in a majority of the church, one is trained to know the answers--to everything. To be the one who answers all the Bible trivia questions correctly is the most envied and admired position in the Sunday School class. It goes beyond just the prizes handed out. It’s some sort of deep-rooted mix of intimidation and respect for that “good Christian” kid. Somehow being a “good Christian” is equated with knowing all the answers. Which is relatively fine until questions start arising that don’t have simple Sunday School answers. Then fear enters in, because somewhere along the line, knowledge of God replaced communing with Him. In a sad perversity, our relationship with our God is called into question as soon as our knowledge runs out.

That difficult mental position is compounded when one is a homeschooler, because, as we all know, homeschoolers know everything, and even if we don’t, we happily convince ourselves that we do. After all, how else can we convince ourselves and everyone else that we’re better than those “public-schoolers” if we’re not smarter than they are?! It’s our duty to be smarter, and that intelligence is evidenced by our knowing everything. (for those of you who are not home schooled, this is not meant offensively--I’m just transcribing the thought process I’ve been through)
So when a question comes up about something spiritual, and we don’t have an answer for it, that dreaded statement “I don’t know” surfaces, only to be squelched as quickly as possible as we try to fill the void with new “knowledge”. We reason ourselves into answers, perhaps missing the whole point.

To a certain level, whatever we understand, we can control. We have control of conversation we’re knowledgeable and experienced in. We do well in school because we have “mastered” the material. And, to a certain point, our understanding of God controls our Christianity, because we aren’t out of control in situations we can explain. When everything fits into a box of explanation, nothing’s uncomfortable. But when something arises outside of one’s ability to explain, one is no longer in control, and being out of control is terrifying.

But I don’t ever recall an instance where the Holy Spirit required us to be able to explain what He does. I don’t ever recall Him expecting us to explain Him. If He really is the God we get merely a written glimpse of in the Word, how can we ever expect Him to fit into our boxes of reason and understanding?

"I don't know." Such a simple phrase, yet such a foreboding one, too. It indicates a lack of control, a subtle or subconscious surrender to something or someone.
When we have a God who is so big that it’ll take us all eternity to even begin to unpack all He is, maybe, just maybe, we need to learn to say, “I don’t know,” as explanation of what He’s doing and who He is.
And maybe, just maybe, in that now-conscious surrender, He’ll begin to teach us to understand on levels we never would have reached had we tried to fill our lack of knowing by running away from our question into our self-made reason.