Something that I have always been obsessed with is understanding. I think at the heart of all of us we just want to know. To be full of wisdom and to know all the answers. From history to science and religion to identity, we want to know it all. Knowledge has always been power and power is the goal of many.
We live in a world of knowledge. In a world where any bit of information is at your fingertips and only a few clicks away, we know more than another generation the world has ever seen. The world is better educated and many of us can turn on our televisions for a matter of minutes and get an in-depth view about what happen in our town, our state, our country, and the countries of so many other people.
Truly we are a society of knowledge. Something that I have come to love in these last couple of months has been not the desire to know my environment but to know myself. Unfortunately though there isn’t a news station dedicated to giving me a debrief on why I acted the way that I did. there isn’t a written article to tell me why I thought the way that I did. There is just me. me getting lost in my own thoughts.
This isn’t to say that I’m blown in the quest for a more enlightened Connor. I’m joined by fantastic leaders and lots of loving squamates, supporters from every corner of the world (that’s ya’ll), and a loving God that would love nothing more that for me to know myself the way that He does.
The name of my blog is “Knowing Who I Am Before Knowing The I Am.” this whole race has been just that. A means of understanding myself in order that I may know my Abba better. In my first month of my race I was challenged in my permute of knowledge. My ministry host in Romania was a Baptist preacher and didn’t know a whole lot about catholicism and was naturally course. I explained to him the intercession of Mary and of the Saints an we had a very long, but good conversation about the church that I had grown up in. Eventually we made our way to the topic of confession.
He asked me about what my beliefs were about the forgiveness of my sins. I explained to him that I believed that I could only be forgiven by a priest. I later found this out to be false, but in this moment this is what I had believed. the he threw scripture at me. He showed me 1 John 5-7:
This scripture doesn’t talk about going to a priest for the forgiveness of sins. It speaks only of walking in the light of Christ, being upfront about our sins and not hiding in them. To many people this wouldn’t mean much, but this shook me to my core. It had poked a small hole in my faith and I made it seem as if it was falling apart. For me I took this all the way to the extreme because if this part of my faith had been wrong and i didn’t have to confess to a priest after all then was else could be wrong.
That was a bad day. I felt drained before 11:30 in the morning a wanted to go to bed by 12. Thankfully God sent my team mate Joel to save me from my own personal pit of despair. He showed me a book he had been reading that happened to explain the purpose of confession in the catholic church. It explained that the church RECOMMENDS that you go to a priest not that you have to. There are lots of different reasons why they do this but I’m not going to get in that in this blog.
Later on that week one of my leaders approached me and we talked about how I had reacted to this minor poke in my faith. He walked me through realizing that I had put this enormous weight on my shoulders of needing to know. Because I didn’t know I felt as though I failed and in this cases I felt as though I had failed God. I had put so much worth into what I knew that I failed to actually know who the Father knows. To know that he is a God of grace and of compassion.
In Brasov (month one debrief) I declared that would begin to walk by faith rather than this knowledge. This wasn’t me saying that knowledge was a bad thing, but I was acknowledging that it had come between me and God. I still work on this new walk everyday and make sure that when I am pursuing knowledge it isn’t in justification of my faith but rather in the pursuit of a stronger faith (this is a hard line to draw some time, not going to lie).
Recently the father has begun walking me down a new path of enlightenment. It’s the path of self knowledge. knowing who I am and why I am. From digging into words of my past to taking the Enneagram (a tool to help you understand the lens through which you see the world and lies you have believe about yourself and others). There is a lot that I have seen in this last couple of weeks, there is a lot more to find out as well, but the greatest part about all of this though is I have never felt closer to the Father. In this journey of discovering who I am I have begun to find out who the Father is. Understanding his grace and his love for me.
