LIMITED UNDERSTANDING

“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”  (1 Corinthians 13:12 ESV)

C. S. Lewis once said, "[Sometimes] when I lay [my] questions before God I get no answer.  But a rather special sort of No answer.  It is not the locked door, it is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze.  As though He shook His head not in refusal but in waiving the question, like, 'Peace, child you don't understand'."

Sometimes it seems our greatest hope is that we don't understand. Because from the vantage we have when we are feeling low, the sense of the futility of life, and the apparent finality of death, can all but overwhelm us.

Far better to acknowledge that our understanding is limited, to relish the stories of faith and intuition that come to us -- and wait and see!  We stand so close.  What if someone trying to view Michelangelo's magnificent painting of "The Creation of Adam" in the Sistine chapel got so close that all he could see was two fingertips touching?  A good view, but a very small piece of the whole picture.

The questions are unanswerable.  The real question is one of trust. 

-- Martha Whitmore Hickman in “Healing After Loss”

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