The God Who Knows Me

I read "Today's Word" by Skip Moen fairly frequently. I've communicated with him once or twice and find many of his insights to be profound. Today was one of those times:

He wrote about Psalm 139:23-24 which reads, "Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting."

He goes on to the talk about what I've always referred to as the "prison of self". That might be a harsh way of describing the thought, but my thought is: I can never really know what its like to be someone else and they can never really know what its like to be me. As Skip puts it,

There is an "inner self" that remains obscure to anyone else, a kind of personal and private book that only we know, and that, in fact, can't really be communicated to anyone else because it is in reality our own experiences of being. No autobiography, no confessional, no diary can ever really capture what it means to be me."

He goes on to say..."except God." Many of us, myself included, have a conception of God (and Skip talks about this too) as being an observer. Back in college, there was a professor I used to meet with on a regular basis and it was more of a counseling type relationship and once he asked me, "When you picture God, where is He now and what is He doing?" I said, "He's over there sitting in a chair on the other side of the room with His head in His hands, shaking His head at me." I very much had, and still have to a degree, this conception of God as being an observer...

But what if he's more like, as Skip suggests, a conjoined twin? And maybe even more than that - He knows what its like to be me.

Skip's final thought for the day is what got me: "Adam longed for an answer to loneliness. So do we all. Loneliness is the most terrifying experience any human being can endure. But Eva (Ishsha) wasn't the real answer. She was a temporary relief measure. The real answer is the one David sought. The God who knows."