Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me.
John 14:1
I have a troubled heart this week.
Well, doctors are trying to determine whether or not I have a troubled heart this week, and the potential troubled physical heart is troubling my psychological heart. As I go through some more testing and appointments, I’m trying to focus on other things. And, I’m working on remembering that I serve a huge God who knows what’s going on, even when I don’t.
Several weeks ago, I sat in my Bible study discussion group and shared an analogy about trying to understand an infinite God:
In my family, at least three of us have what the audiologist called a “notch” out of our hearing. There is one frequency that we cannot hear at all, and there’s a good chance we’ve never been able to hear that frequency. I will never “understand” that frequency because I’ve never heard it. I couldn’t describe it to you if I tried. However, I completely trust the audiologist when she tells me that that frequency does exist. People have discerned and studied all the different frequencies and know that they exist, and the average person with unhindered hearing can hear all the frequencies within the normal human range of hearing. So, without a doubt, I trust that that frequency exists. I don’t question it, I just know it’s there and that I can never understand it.
God is like that too. God is the expert of our stories, of our universe and of our hearts like the audiologist is the expert for our hearing. There are some aspects of God that we can never truly grasp as a human. He is so much bigger and beyond our scope of understanding that there are somethings we will never fully comprehend, and we learn to lean into and trust God, just like I trust the audiologist.
The majority of the understanding in our world is based on our physical environments. We understand complex concepts because there is a physical example of it somewhere in our world. Even in the Bible, Jesus utilized concrete farming and fishing parables to explain more complex concepts.
Yet, our world is finite, not infinite. There are concepts that we can never truly wrap our minds around because there is nothing that is its physical counterpart in our own world. Even concepts as “simple” as eternity are incomprehensible because there is nothing physically eternal in our world. We just have to trust that eternity exists.
Our personal lives are also at times complete mysteries to us: we don’t know our future, we don’t know if a loved one with cancer will survive, we don’t understand why we had to go through what we did in the past. And today, I don’t know what the doctors will conclude about my heart. I might be completely fine, I might have an electrolyte imbalance or I might have a physical abnormality with my heart (which, for many real reasons, I believe is the least likely outcome). It is hard, though, to not understand. It’s hard to sit in limbo and wait.
But, I know that I serve an infinite God. He knows what’s going on, and he knows how every event contributes to my life or the lives of others. And this week, I have to lean into the peace that I know he gives.
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.
John 14:27
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