I don't know - ask God

Lynn-nore will tell you (I hear Amen's from many others) that I find it very hard to focus on more than a handful of things at once. The number may be as high as five, but I suspect it may hover around 3, growing less as one of those becomes more demanding or complex. Yet, as so many of you have reminded me, usually through your patient but self-evident frustration at what probably appears to you as "procrastination" (which it usually is not), life is infinitely more complex than that. Believe me, I know.

The blind know that the color green exists. The lame know that others walk. We know, today, that there are cities of teeming thousands sharing the planet with us right now which we will never visit or even hear about. And, sometimes, we are aware of this, aren't we? We step outside of our experience and are aware of other, larger experiences; we are just human beings, after all, and finite. Moments like this, illuminative moments, always give me a weird feeling, like the moment of weightlessness before falling. I had just such an experience in the last 12 hours.

Last night, laying down to go to bed, Lynn-nore twining her fingers into mine, that feeling just swept over me. I felt absolutely alone, held against some infinite space only by her fingers. I used to get this way when I was a kid, and then, later, in college (college was a period of daily buffeting by this feeling). It is a sudden loss of meaning; like that woman who lost one of her talents. The usual solution in such cases is prayer - there is no space, even the empty space of existence, that is not full-up with God. "What is man that you are mindful of him?"

Then, this morning, I was getting up, sitting there on the side of the bed, late in awaking, trying to remember what day it was. Lynn-nore woke up and said, groggily, "I was having this awful dream that we were fighting." And, as if in protest, she says, "I love you," and then goes back to sleep. I turned back to contemplate rising, but in my mind I was thinking, "I am here now, I was in that existential space, and just a moment ago, as I was waking, there was a *me* fighting with Lynn-nore in her dream."

Work is the public face. You do what you do, drive, park, find food, find tasks. There isn't anything deeper than silicon here. Pour a million meetings into a day, and you haven't talked to a single human being, or even said anything worth remembering. Then you drive home, and there are the tasks of "the workday evening." Even Kara doesn't say anything, except at night when she's about to go to sleep.

The other night I had tucked her in was getting ready to leave when she starts talking, in a clear, non-loopy, focused way, about what had happened that day at school. I was surprised that the giddy, unreachably tired child of seconds before had suddenly changed over, and so I sat down on the foot of her bed and listened as she talked with me. Not about tasks, but about life.

[One more paragraph.] This weeekend, Lynn-nore and I are going to a fairly dense weekend marriage seminar. Every couple that we know who has gone just raves about it, and the Lord has made it possible for us to go. There is the technical details of getting there, of wearing, eating, introducing, note-taking. But I'm expecting that we will have moments - 15 minute breakouts or something - where suddenly it is like, "What is your deepest experience of love...think quickly now." Can I even do this? Can I leap out, dive down, and come up again...who the heck is this, existing in that void, in that dream, teetering on that bed, working this job, fathering (and just being a fellow human being) to this child? Can we even say what our deepest anything is? Do we know anything authentic, or do we only know in hindsight? Have we ever stopped long enough to become aware enough to even say?

As I said above, I find it hard to focus on many things at once. Most things are just tasks, but these leave scarce time for real being. If one never sees oneself, or only as it is convenient to do so, or only just before sleeping, or in snatches with one's child, how can we know? What is your deepest experience? How do you know authentically anything? Would you even recognize anything if you had it? What if you had something but forgot it, or if you might have something, but you aren't sure? Isn't it true, really, that we don't know anything and would be lost in that void, falling forever, if it wasn't that God knows us?

We will never really know. Instead, we must take ourselves from the point of being known.

You have made them a little lower than God;
You have crowned them with glory and honor;
You have given them dominion -
O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!