Peace in the Unknown

Oh, how I wish I was dumb.

Do you know how once you see something, you can’t unsee it? Once you feel something special…like love, you simply can’t go back to a place where it was only a story someone once told you.

To know, to feel, to experience. It all makes us smarter in a sense. It opens our eyes, and sometimes our hearts, to a piece of wisdom that can’t be forgotten.

They say that ignorance is bliss, and I fully believe that. But it’s only bliss for a while, I think. You know better, you do better. Maybe. Or you know better and then you’re stuck with the thorn in your side of striving to do that “better” when you really could’ve been fully content doing that worse. But see, you didn’t know it was “worse,” so it felt great at the time.

Semantics, perhaps. I won’t argue that. But these words have a feeling and a knowing attached that I just can’t shake.

Being in a blissful marriage and smiling for photos and attending the birthday parties and posting the memories—that’s glorious. Don’t tell me the lies, because then my bliss is broken. Forever.

So I used to think I wanted ignorance. It made me happy. What I didn’t know didn’t hurt me.

But I can’t hold that truth in one hand while also feeling the power of reality in the other. I guess that hand is the Knowledge-is-power-hand. So now I’m stuck. Pick a hand, any hand. Which one do I want? Now I’m starting to sweat, and I can’t make a decision. Don’t make me do it.

Is there a place where I can feel peace with a little ignorance? I think so.

I’m studying angels now. This book is really packed. It’s the mysterious and the factual. And it’s cracking open my imagination to a place of: I want to know. But if you’ve ever studied anything of God, you’ve learned that first, there are no dead ends. And also (not second), the roads journey on with pockets and detours and secret trails that expand incomplete. At least in our human minds, they do.

There are some things we’ll just never know on this earth. And this morning, I found my mouth praying (because I didn’t even realize I was thinking it) for peace in the unknown. To find assurance in the mysteries of God and perhaps also the contentment in the very mundane mysteries of my own little life. What’s my future, what’s my calling, what’s the ending of it all?

So maybe things aren’t so black and white, and I don’t want to be dumb after all. I just want a dose of peace in the list of things I don’t know now, may learn one day, and will never know at all.