Random thoughts

Some thoughts I've been thinking as of late:

The proposition is that you cannot know someone completely until they're dead. This is because, at any moment in time, you can only know someone for who they are at the time. You might know who they have been, but you can't know who they will be, so you don't have a holistic knowledge of them. Say my friend Erica somehow manages to put up with me for another 50 years, and then I die. When she remembers me, she is able to know me in a way she couldn't during the 50 years we were both alive. Because only once I'm dead, can she have a holistic view of me. Whereas when we were both living, she only knew the version of me that I was in the moment. It's like when you're reading a novel: your knowledge of the characters is limited to who they are on the page you're reading. But once you've finished the novel, you have a holistic view of the characters... they are every version of themselves at once.

Peter Kreeft says that our heavenly bodies will be so coated in our essence, so saturated in who we are, that every square inch of us is recognizable to others the way that only our faces are in these earthly bodies. This idea is similar, only it goes beyond physical recognition to the soul of a person. I've never thought before that I can't know someone completely until their life is over, but once it is, who they are contains who they were in every stage of their earthly lives. So in heaven, or when the Kingdom comes to earth, we will all be the most holistic, complete versions of ourselves we could ever be, and we will know one another more fully and holistically than we ever did on earth. It will be as though the child Lauren and the teenager Lauren and the young adult Lauren and the wife Lauren and the mother Lauren and the cranky old woman Lauren are all layered on top of one another to form the true version of me. And and everyone will see each of those layers when they look at me.

(This idea is not mine originally; it was inspired by a realization Sheldon Vanauken records in his memoir "A Severe Mercy")

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Needs vs. wants: When first considering this relationship I concluded that there’s freedom in recognizing the difference between our needs and our wants because it influences our perception of God. For instance, if I don’t end up going back to South Africa and I fail to see that desire as a want (vs. a need), I could be very angry at and hurt by God for not allowing me the fulfillment of what I perceive to be a need.

Upon further reflection, I think that’s wrong.

And this is why: as long as we’re the ones determining which desires are wants and which are needs, we’re caught in that trap. I think to achieve freedom we have to offer up everything – every longing in our hearts – without division or priority or importance, and trust God to provide for us. It’s more complicated than just putting some desires in the “want” box and some in the “need” box. It’s about timing, it’s about our process and growth and I think the same desire could be a want one day and a need the next, depending on where we are. And who can know that but God?

At one point last year I was feeling neglected by God; like maybe he wasn’t seeing me for who I am because I was feeling very unfulfilled despite the fact that all the “big” things in my life were in place. As a result, I was growing distant from him, because when I’m disappointed by God I go into hiding. A friend recommended that I talk to God about every little thing I felt I deserved or needed or just wanted real bad. That was a struggle for me, because though it’s always been natural for me to ask God to provide an apartment and a job and the finances to make tuition payments. But asking him for things that were more emotional - things I felt were irrational - was completely foreign to me. And the biggest challenge I had was fighting the urge to screen all my desires through an “is it a holy desire?” screen. The moment I recognized a desire hidden in my heart, a trillion things pop into my head: “you only have that need because you’re damaged” and “you should want God to fulfill that instead of asking for someone or some thing to” and so on. But the fact of the matter is, my longings are what they are: damaged and idolatrous and selfish and all the rest. Period.

So that’s what I shared with God, and I fought the urge to clarify and qualify everything I said. I just expressed it how I felt it, and I cried over it and I just handed him that sloppy, irrational, slimy, needy mess. I did that with dozens of things: desires I’d never even expressed out loud before. And afterwards I felt as though I’d dropped a burden off. I guess that’s what I did.
Because even though lots of the things I asked him for and whined about not having may not be things I really need, he knows that, and he won't accidentally hand me something that isn't good for me. The key is that we don't have to try and decide what’s important enough to ask God for, but to ask him for everything we want, everything we feel we need, and have enough faith in him to provide for us what we really do need.

(This line of thinking stemmed from a conversation with a friend.)