Think about the smartest person you know. Think about how intelligent they are. Now compare them to some of the greatest minds in the world - Albert Einstein, Issac Newton, Thomas Edison - science greats that completely changed the world. Your smart friend isn’t looking so much a genius now, are they?
What makes a person brilliant?
Is it the ability for them to take the world at face value and turn their observations around and around in their minds until they can mentally piece all the moving parts together? Is it the way they draw connections between facts and times and ideas, and how they can see a solution to a problem by just looking at the problem?
Have you ever been in class with someone and wondered - how does your mind work?
On the flip side, have you ever met a person that just didn’t get it? They couldn’t understand the simplest of ideas or lessons, and it made you wonder how people were able to survive in our world with such a limited mental capacity?
If you think about it for a minute, you realize that the mental spectrum just among people is quite extraordinary. You can see a child, with simple thoughts and simple needs and desires grow into an adult with complex motivations and complex, convoluted ways of thinking. The complexities of people can change with age, time and education.
So what if I told you, that despite our higher education, our growing maturity and decades of scientific breakthroughs - that we, as people, are incredibly simple. Our nature is not so complex.
Go ahead, scoff. I don’t blame you.
Because we are complex and difficult to understand. However, in relative terms, we are not complex.
Think about the ants living in that ant pile you see grow every summer. Those little ants work their entire lives to bring food back to the colony, to build the colony, and to help their queen reproduce. It is motivated to eat, work, and reproduce. Yet the common ant never actually does any of the reproducing so really most of them only eat and work. There is no evidence showing that they play games to entertain themselves, or that any of the ants compete in any sort of athletic games. They simply eat and work. It seems so simple, and so not complex. Comparatively then, humans are more complex than ants.
Think now about your pet, or your friends’ pet if you don’t have one. They lounge about for most of the day, eating when hungry, drinking when thirsty, and playing with each other or their owner. Occasionally they preform miracles duties and save their owners from one thing or another and we all praise them and are in awe over how “smart” they are. Yet still, most pets don’t hold a job or really even have any goals that they work towards. So we can say they are more complex than the aforementioned ants, but still less complex than us.
Now then, we have decided, due to much research and lacking evidence to the contrary - that we humans are the most complex and intelligent creature we know of. That stands to reason - I haven’t seen very many other animals discovering space travel.
But how utterly conceited and vain is it that we should think that we are sitting at the very top of the intelligence spectrum. We’ve already discussed how some of us - aren’t. So it stands to reason then, that our God, if we really believe that He created us for crying out loud - is more complex than us. Doesn’t it make sense, that while we are aware of him - much like our pets are aware of us - we don’t necessarily see the full picture, like when we leave for work and our dogs wait patiently for our return.
Imagine the difference in complexity between ants and us - now scale that as if we are the ants to imagine God’s complexity.
That’s why the Great Mystery is so named - it is a mystery, and while the Gospel does give us the big details to explain the mystery to us, we don’t have the full story. We don’t have the timeline, we don’t have information on what happened to Jesus during his three days of Death (although there are theories). We are missing so much! Yet that doesn’t mean that those details don’t exist or that the Gospel is incomplete. I think, rather, it means that our Father, who knows us through and through, knew that some information would not make sense to our simple minds. Complex though we think we are, we are not on God’s level.
Okay, so what’s the point? If we aren’t on God’s level then why are we trying to have a relationship with him?
To all my parents out there, this will make a little more sense to you. Every infant ever born has been born without understanding of the world. Yet with time and growth, they develop a relationship with their mothers and fathers and one day - in their mid-twenties they realize that their mom is their best friend (or was that just me?).
God will always be more complex than us and we will never fully understand him while we are children. But if we continue to pursue him, one day we will mature in Him and He will welcome home his fully grown adult children and we will all cringe at just how immature we were - just like you did when you graduated college or tech school and you look back at your freshman year of high school.
As for me, some days I find myself questioning God. Why did this happen? What was the point of this? Or I’ll be studying the bible and I’ll think to myself “I don’t understand” and I begin to wonder why God would even care about us tiny little humans at all.
It occurred to me recently that I am still a child, both in God and in the World. I pay my bills late, I forget about my laundry, and I don’t know if I know how to cook or if I’ve been getting lucky. And if our time on Earth is our Childhood in God, and I’m not even an “adult” on Earth yet, how could I possibly think I was anything older than a toddler in God? This is not a basis for excuses. Rather this can be my basis for patience. I can be patient with myself when I don’t understand or when I stumble, because toddlers still trip over their own feet and still need help tying their shoes.
However, I cannot be a toddler forever. So while I can be patient and forgive myself, I cannot allow myself to be comfortable in my toddler-ness. Everyday is an opportunity for growth and learning, both which come with set backs.
We are complex in comparison to this earthly world, but we are so simple in comparison to our God - and it is so important to remember that. We won’t have all the answers, and that’s okay! We just have to be patient enough to understand that some things are just too complicated for us to understand, and that’s also okay! Imagine how stressful it would be if we had to organize the comings-and-goings of all the universe.
For me, I want to work on being patient in my own shortcomings, and my own lack of understanding. As I continue studying, I hope to learn and gain understanding - until then, I hope to be patient enough to accept the things I cannot understand and delve deeper into the things I can.
As always, I am but a work in progress.
Cheers.
