Know Who
by Pam Chun © 2003

The older I get and the more I learn, the less I realize I really know.

The pursuit and display of knowledge can be an exhilaratingly heady experience, and for the first half of my life these served as icons. They drove and filled a need to feel competent and in control. Facts and figures, methods, strategies and skills earned me stature and confidence, whether an extraordinary accomplishment like a successful grant request or a mundane triumph over the DMV system in renewing my driver’s license.

As I make my way through mid-life, however, I find the exhilaration short-lived and most accomplishments seasoned with sobering doses of humility. No matter how much I know, I discover even more that I don’t know. As for experience and presumptuous expertise, they still fall short in the face of the unanticipated.
And so I pen this short note to Eve, former residence The Garden of Eden, new residence Unknown: Knowledge isn’t everything the Serpent stacked it up to be.

I am not writing off knowledge. I am constantly acquiring know-how. Life demands that of us. However, I am slowly learning, or perhaps humbly un-learning, that Know-HOW is not as important as Know-WHO. We have mal-transposed the letters “W,” “H” and “O,” led by the wicked grand deception that HOW trumps WHO.

It began in the Garden. Eve knew the One Who knew everything: God. But Satan proposed that if she knew HOW, she wouldn’t need to know WHO. Self-competence — fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil —proffered the sweetest fruit in all God’s garden with its exotic taste to be god-like.

With her first bite of the fruit, Eve no longer sought God to answer her prayers but began to answer her own. As Satan had told her, she became god-like, positioned at the center of her universe…but not God, and badly limited in ability and power.

Jesus understood these cravings for command and control and competence. Time and again, He watched His band of disciples struggle to shoehorn the Kingdom of God into their known universe. In Mark 8 we read a critical moment when the two worlds collide:

“Then Jesus began to tell them that He, the Son of Man, would suffer many terrible things and be rejected by the leaders, the leading priests, and the teachers of religious law. He would be killed, and three days later He would rise again. As He talked about this openly with His disciples, Peter took Him aside and told Him He shouldn’t say things like that. Jesus turned and looked at His disciples and then said to Peter very sternly, ‘Get away from Me, Satan! You are seeing things merely from a human point of view, not from God’s.’” (Mark 8:31-33 NLT)

Peter had accurate knowledge of what was to come, but he focused his response in How to handle it rather than Who. He tried to convince Jesus to deny and subvert God’s will, in effect saying, “Forget WHO is taking your through this; you know HOW to get around this, Jesus!”

How often do we, too, focus on the How? We spend everything we have to acquire Know-How, skills, tools, strategies in order to take command. But in situations beyond our control — quite frankly most situations in my case—our foremost thought should be the opposite of Peter’s: Forget about HOW to get around it and remember WHO will take me through it.

As I look at the year ahead, I see it already strewn with obstacles and difficulties. In the past, I would have asked, “HOW will I get through this?” Now instead, I ask, “WHO will get me through this?” The answer every time is Jesus Christ.

This year I hope my path through life will be no longer driven and marked by accomplishment but by accompaniment. And not Jesus walking at my side, but me following Him. HOW better to walk through life? Who better to follow?

“If any of you wants to be my follower,” He told them, “you must put aside your selfish ambition, shoulder your cross, and follow Me. If you try to keep your life for yourself, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for My sake and for the sake of the Good News, you will find true life. And how do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul in the process? Is anything worth more than your soul?” (Mark 8:34-37 NLT)

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