The matter-of-fact statement from my 4-year-old threw me off guard a bit. “Oh, you do?” “Yep!” She was confident in it.
“Kathryn, who taught you everything?”
“You did.”
“But Mommy doesn’t know everything, so how could she teach you everything?”
“I don’t know. But I know everything.”
I proceeded to tell her that she doesn’t actually know everything, none of us do. And that Mommy tells her things as she’s ready to learn them. Like how, just hours before, when trying to (sort of) explain death to her I have to tell her things in ways she’ll understand. (that one flopped… “If I die, you’ll have to buy a new Kathryn”).
I probably have lots of epiphanies when parenting, but this one felt especially paramount.
How often do I want to understand all the things (and to think that I might even know all the things), only to be reminded that, actually, I don’t. And, actually, God’s best for me might mean not explaining the very thing I feel so desperate to know. Because maybe I won’t understand it yet. Maybe I just can’t understand it.
Maybe, like my small, smart, beautiful daughter, I’m just unable to fully grasp the concepts and the constructs that God, the Creator of the world, is working within. Perhaps I’m not ready. Perhaps knowing the whole truth isn’t beneficial, but actually harmful. Perhaps knowing all the logistics about how everything will work out isn’t necessary to know… I just have to get in the van and ride. My dad will take care of the details.
And how often does learning require repetition? How many times do I count to 50 with her? How many times do I tell her to stay in her seat at dinner?
Perhaps our gravest error is to think we’ve learned anything at all. To think we “know everything”. Instead of approaching life with a posture of humility, eager to learn about the world, eager to learn about the Lord – a constant recognition that we still have so far to go.
Maybe then…
Maybe then I’d be the type of person who meets adversity with trust instead of the facade of control. A type of surrender, really. “God, I have no idea why this is happening and it literally makes no sense to me… but to You, God, with infinite wisdom, foresight and sovereignty… I believe that it does.”
And to believe that He is still good.
Because Kathryn does. Even when consequences arise, even when she doesn’t understand why she’s being told to do something, even when she doesn’t understand the concepts that have very real implications on her life…
She still believes that I’m good.
She still loves me.
She still trusts me.
It’s one the most humbling things I’ve ever encountered.
My arms are the arms she wants holding her. My hugs are the last ones she wants at night. She lives in a world where she doesn’t have to know what she will eat each day, but she knows that she will. She exists in such a way where she can be screaming in my face one second, but snuggled against my chest the next. It’s a safety, a trust, that comes when you truly know you can be at your worst and still loved and cared for.
Faith of a child.
Always teaching us, challenging us, reminding us.
We may never know… and maybe that’s okay.
But may we still believe Him to be a God who is for us, even when it feels like He may be against us. Because somehow my daughter can grasp that about me… how I long to do the same toward Him.
Humanity – learning everything, over and over and over again.