"Fo’ real?" How certainty makes me itch #1

I grew up in a world full of people who knew things. They did not merely believe this or that, they knew it. They were certain. Four food groups, grammar, God; everything was known. Any hint of uncertainty was quickly attacked with quick remedies or "concerns" about faith or intelligence. People who were uncertain were weak.

I have a problem with certainty. At best it is like what I did in high school math – look in the back of the book for the answers and then turn in the homework. I was certain my answers were right. Heck, if the book is wrong I have that as an excuse, right? In math, the answer is important, but it is not the point. You can’t build a bridge with answers. You need to know process. You need to wrestle with the problem in order to know it. Frankly, I learned a lot of answers I never understood. Apply this to faith and it gets real scary, real fast. In short, you cannot deeply understand an answer without experiencing the problem. Yet a rush to certainty encourages that very thing.

Certainty in relationships is a dangerous thing. If you were to ask me, "Hey Chris, do you know who your wife is?" I could confidently answer, with certainty, that I do know who she is. That's fine, but I'd better not quit there. At the very same time, I could answer honestly that I have much to learn about my wife, and that I do not know who she is, not fully. Here is the danger: If I come to believe I know everything about her, then I have effectively quit learning about her because why the heck would I waste my time learning something I already know? She would become like a stock character in a second rate film. Predictable, simplistic, merely functional. No, there is more depth, more heart, more meaning in her – in anyone.

Certainty kills the necessary mystery that makes relationships dynamic and meaningful.