Know Me

I’ve felt rejection; you’ve felt rejection. We’d prefer acceptance, so rejection hurts. This morning, however, I experienced a deeper perspective.

There is something that goes beyond the standard "love or hate," or "rejection or acceptance." There is knowledge. This isn’t a question of, "do you love or hate what you know of me?" or, "do you accept or reject what you know of me?" The question becomes, "do you want to know me?" For some reason, we most often are scared of that knowing thing: both of knowing someone else, and of being known. Perhaps it would take too much time—and it unquestionably does take a lot of time. Perhaps some disagreeable things would become known. Perhaps I’d discover that you love something I hate, or that if you knew that about me, you would not want to know any more. But I think it goes even beyond that.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a song that included the lyrics, "If You’re the only One to ever know//I want You to know me." Yet, surely, God already knows me. He knows the words I’ve yet to speak, and He knows the thoughts I’ve never given voice to. He knows every tear I’ve cried, and has numbered the hairs on my head. That’s knowledge. That being the case, why would I bother asking the Lord to know me? Inviting Him to know me? Yet even in His knowledge, there is something different in His knowing "the path of the righteous," and Jesus’ statement of, "Depart from me, I never knew you."

I am pretty sure there is a journey of knowledge that He can take only with us. Hypnosis—or any type of "mindless" experience—is not what God calls us into. He calls us into the knowledge of Him, and I believe He wants that circle of intimacy to be complete, with Him knowing us. The hang-up lies in the fact that He can’t "go there" without us.

Let me attempt to put it another way. He knows us to the degree that we know ourselves. Maybe you think that’s easy (sure, I know me: I like vanilla ice cream with peanuts on it) but it is a lifelong journey. Just as I’ll never know all there is of God, I will never know all there is of me. Everything more I learn of me shows me something about God that I hadn’t known before, and everything I learn about God makes me feel safer in learning more about myself.

This is the source of most of our concern, I think. We’re largely afraid that we’ll come across something in ourselves that will cause God to turn His back on us. If people, in their partial knowledge of us, reject us and say "I don’t want to know more," what will be the results of God’s full knowledge of us?

But it is safe to go there, because He is love, and He wants to know you.

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