I Don't Know You Anymore

Try loving someone you don’t know. It’s impossible on a practical level.

I’m not talking about having feelings of empathy for someone you learn about in the news who’s suffered. I’m talking about intense affection grounded in commitment. That kind of love only grows from knowing another ever more deeply.

And I’m certainly not talking about infatuation – that concentrated, nearly blinding but always brief fondness for someone you’ve just met but barely know. Infatuation is fueled by giddy emotion and playful intimacy and nothing more. True love is fueled by knowledge. We cannot love what we do not know.

At the age of 15, when I wedded my life to Jesus of Nazareth, I didn’t know much about this Son of Man except for the oft-repeated stories about his birth (Christmas) and his resurrection (Easter). I’m not sure how much love was in my heart that motivated me to be drawn to him. There had to be something there, but certainly not enough to last a lifetime.

Year by year I grew in my knowledge and understanding of this amazing man, and thus a corresponding increase in my love for him followed. The more I knew him the more I loved him.

The same phenomenon happens in all our relationships. Acquaintances become friends. Boyfriends become buddies. Girlfriends become wives. Bosses become mentors. None of this happens without an increase in knowing who these people are at deeper and richer levels.

In those early young-faith years, I had almost an insatiable appetite to devour the Bible. In college I’d go to the library to study and end up reading Scripture instead. It was not uncommon for me to read up to forty chapters a day. I was piling on theological knowledge with spiritual understanding and growing like a weed in the Garden of Eden.

Unfortunately for me, with heaps of knowledge came tons of dogmatism*. [*The expression of an opinion or belief as if it were a fact. It is characterized by unfounded positiveness in matters of opinion. Dogmatism can also refer to the use of a system of ideas based upon insufficiently examined premises. It is often associated with arrogant assertion of opinions as truths. Merriam-Webster]

I was leading a Bible study in our home and a men’s group in another. I was teaching an adult Sunday school class. I was the high school youth group leader in the church. I became the self-taught Mr. Answer Man when it came to divine revelation. I thought I knew so much that there weren’t any more questions that couldn’t be answered. There was no more mystery. I’d scaled the mountain of God and come down as though I were a mini-Moses.

Back then I didn’t see the difference between loving God and loving my knowledge of God. Now, don’t get me wrong. My love of God was deep, and in that depth, I experienced periods of spiritual ecstasy I can’t put into words. The problem I couldn’t see was that my love for God had never been tested, and therefore remained unexamined and unchallenged. Just the kind of seedbed dogmatism needed to fester and grow a little more resilient each year.

The most profound, most vulnerable relationship we have is the marriage bond. Hopefully, we tie the knot only after we are convinced that what we know about this other person is so beautifully magnificent that it warrants a lifelong commitment. Till death do us part is a statement of finality, that there will be no doubting and no separation until that last breath. In one sense it is a dogmatic declaration made long before those 25th or 50th wedding anniversaries that celebrate both survival and achievement – the triumph of fulfilling a promise without any evidence that it could be kept.

If only the world existed in a static state, then faith and fidelity would never be subject to the weathering that comes from real life. Overnight, in an instant, I lost my grip on who God was. All that knowledge of him that I polished every year simply faded into a blur of discouragement, disappointment, and despair. Much of what I thought I knew about God proved to be inconsequential in the struggle to find hope for a miracle, or proof that he even cared or listened. I was a ship without an anchor on an angry sea. The best I could expect was a shipwreck that saved my life but little else.

Old friendships that aren’t sustained by contemporary knowledge gradually lose vigor until they are so diminished they can no longer be called friends, or even acquaintances. All those old friends from school, college, and former hometowns don’t register anywhere with me. Almost all of them can’t reach Facebook friend status.

The same thing happens with the husband and wife who have tired of the adventure of knowing the other. Early in the relationship everything was a discovery because there was so much of the unknown. Yet, over time they both assume there’s no intrigue left that can assuage the mundanity of their monotonous lives. When before exploration was invigorating, now it’s fatiguing. What they know of each other has grown stale. Similarly, their love adapts to the pseudo-allure of lukewarm like it was always meant to be.

Much of the superstructure of my faith collapsed when I realized I didn’t know God anymore. Few of his words in the Bible made any sense, and he certainly wasn’t acting in my life like he had acted in the lives of others. My spiritual knowledge base constricted so much that my love for God experienced a corresponding puncture so deflating it seemed all of my adoration for him had vanished.

Rebuilding love takes time, but I’m hard at it. The old timbers that once were thought to be stormproof have been replaced with supports retrofitted with a clearer and deeper understanding of suffering and of the Suffering Servant who learned obedience through the things with which he had to struggle. With a new appreciation for what is true and what is fluff, I’m leaning in a little more each day. And with the leaning comes the loving.

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