"One thing I do know. I was
blind, but now I see!" ~John 9:25b
I don't know much, but "one thing I do know." Jesus loves
me. It always boils down to that one, sweet, simple childhood tune for me.
All my thinking and analyzing reduce down to a line many Americans, even if they
don’t believe its truth, at least hear as a child. To know, to understand, to
realize… I am relearning this again.
Brennan Manning wrote, “To know is
to be transformed by what one knows.” I would personalize that a smidge and say
that for me, it is by whom one knows. I am convinced that anything I
know is just chaff and husk if I know it apart from the love of Jesus for me.
His love impels me, empowers me, strengthens me, encourages me, enwisens me,
directs me, and shapes me. I use “me” after each to emphasize the reality and
impact.
This Potter keeps His hands around
me when I am on the wheel. It is my flesh under His fingernails. Even though
the scraping is uncomfortable and oftentimes bruising and sometimes agony, it
is always necessary. He would not impose a mark or pull across the
smallest point without sure, loving purpose. Oswald Chambers is right—I go
through it for the most part misunderstandingly. Clarity and understanding may or may not come in this life. We live on the underside of a tapestry where the colors are inverted, threads criss-cross, and loose strands dangle unknotted. I
think it was C. S. Lewis who said the thing we’ll say most often when we get to
Heaven, and the front of the tapestry is revealed, will be something like, “Ohhh, of course it had to be that way…”
I am not often proud of my behavior
throughout the whole day. I am often peevish, moody, sad, anxious, gritchy, or
morose. It is the awareness of His Love and purposeful abiding inside me that
interjects to infuse Hope. Sometimes it is in answer to my crying out.
Sometimes He sets it in my mind, and I’m taken off guard. Always though, it is welcome.
I am pauper and princess, tart and
tiara, menace and marvel—a paragon of paradox. Why I would lean so heavily on
my own human resources—feeble, few, and faint—is just plain sad. And yet, even
as I write this, believing it all to be true, I am without self-condemnation
and have NO crooked, bony finger poking into my chest. Instead, it is the same
thing I am reminded of in sprinklings throughout the day: I don’t know much, but Jesus Loves ME, this
I know.
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