I Don't Know (Friday Devotional)

“For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.”

- Psalm 139:13-16

“Hey babe, I’m free for lunch. Where do you want to go?”

“Hmm…you pick.”

“Come on, I picked the last three times. It’s your turn.”
“But I’m drawing a complete blank. Why don’t you just pick?”
“We could do American food, Italian, Mexican, Mediterranean. Pizza, burgers, sandwiches, salad, barbecue…what sounds good?”

“I don’t know…”

“Seriously? You don’t want any of those??”

“I don’t know. That all sounds good. And also all kind of sounds bad. I don’t know what I want!”

Some variation of that conversation happens, I suspect, every single day in the United States. And as much as we sympathize with the frustration in this conversation, surely we also empathize with the indecision. After all, what they said is true: sometimes we don’t know we want!

This seems preposterous on its face—if anyone should know what you want at a given moment, surely it’s you. But there is a lot more uncertainty tied up with self-awareness than we acknowledge. Sometimes you know exactly what you want, where you’re going, and who you are. But sometimes you don’t.

What a relief then to know that there is someone who knows you better than you know yourself. When you were still trying to decide whether you wanted to be an astronaut, a firefighter, or a racecar driver when you grew up, God already knew which vocation suited you best—and which you would choose. When you were agonizing over your high school dating life, God already knew what kind of partner complemented you best—not just then, but as 20-year old and a 40-year old and a 60-year old. When you’ve questioned your abilities, doubted your instincts, and feared for your future, God has always been a refuge of certainty, fully aware of your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for growth…even when you weren’t.

The amazing truth is that God has known you and loved you since the moment He created you, when you were but “unformed substance.” There may be times when you feel like you’re still not fully formed—you don’t always have the answers, you don’t always know what’s next, and you don’t always even know what you want. Until the day when you “know fully, even as [you] have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12), your life will always be full of such uncertainties. But of this much you can be certain: even when you don’t know, the Creator of the universe—and of you—surely does.