Understanding

The wound care doctor was happy about the progress of the wound, although it is obvious even to me that a minor surgery will be necessary to remove some of the unviable tissue.  It will be carried out whenever I have gathered enough mental strength to step into pain once again.  The pain has been manageable, though not gone by any means. Nausea and bloating have lessened somewhat.  What is new is the gradually worsening persistent dry cough.  Hopefully, there is a simple explanation behind it. Energy level is still OK, although there is little time left for writing down thoughts after treatments, teaching, and research.  I wish I could bring a laptop into the hyperbaric chamber or that I could write like C. S. Lewis.

Understanding brings peace?

It was well said by Helen Keller, “I do not want the peace which passeth understanding (Philippians 4:7), I want the understanding which bringeth peace”. We desire to know so badly that our ancestors ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge.

For example, one of the most nagging and unsolvable questions is that of human suffering.  Honestly, I have been disappointed that I have not been able to find many answers to human suffering in the Bible even before I entered the school of suffering; a class, it seems, where few students sign up voluntarily and where the Professor does little more than leave overwhelmingly difficult homework problems without posting the exact solutions. Since my teenage years, I have been horrified and confused, e.g., by the fact that six million Jews and eighteen million Chinese and countless others perished in  WWII (which, of course, illustrates how crooked we are).  The sheer number alone is both mind boggling and terrifying, without even considering the cruel ways in which they died.  For reasons only known to God himself, God seemed to miss a perfect opportunity by not directly answering Job’s question about suffering, only reminding Job how all-mighty He is.  When some of us try to fill in the blanks, I have found that most words and writings about the issue, including mine, sound hollow and all but definitive.

Obviously, the fruit of the tree of knowledge did not work as well as our ancestors have hoped.  We still do not know much about anything.  However, let’s say that we do get to know anything we would like to know.

 1. Do we have the wisdom and integrity worthy of the knowledge? For example, if I know which way a stock will go tomorrow, how long can I resist the persistent urge to profit from that knowledge?  If given the power to hear everything women are thinking like actor Mel Gibson in the movie “What Women Want?”, how many men can refrain from abusing that knowledge?  If I knew how to build a new weapon that is a million times more powerful than the hydrogen bomb, it probably wouldn’t be long before I could find a justification for building one and subsequently using its power for a “good” cause such as demanding all nations to come to a peace talk.

2. Do we really want to know the persistent inner thoughts of spite, jealousy, greed, lust, pride and self-satisfaction within ourselves and others?  How could we sleep if we knew all of that?  (It is definitely not easy to be God.)  For example, do we really want to know every time our spouse lusts over somebody else, or even just an image on a TV or a computer monitor?

3. Do we really care enough or have the strength to find out the reality?  We don’t want to think of and be reminded of such things as cancer wards, bald young children who drag a chemo pump along side them, amputees, double amputees, the fact that a specie goes extinct every few minutes because of human activities, a child dies of mal-nutrition every few seconds because of our poor food distribution, a billion plus people have to go by with less than a dollar a day, etc.  

4. How many of us feel secure enough to find out how God and others really think about our work and us?  More often than not, we are seeking affirmation rather than truth when we ask a question like “What do you think?”, “How did I do?”, or “Do you think I am a good person?”

May this find you and your loved ones in good spirit and health.