AS True

It is one thing to know something is true. It is another to know something as true.

Maybe you’re heard me say this before. It’s become a “go to” quote, one I first heard at a women’s event at my church, years ago. (It was Kirstin King who said it, to give credit where it’s due.)

Here’s an example. Last week, during a FaceTime call with my son, Felipe, I got to meet his current girlfriend, a cute and seemingly shy young lady, named Louisa. A few minutes into our conversation, I flipped my camera to give the young people a glimpse of our winter landscape, telling them about our subzero temps. They were unimpressed. Louisa, who has never been to Minnesota, knows winter is true, but she has no context. Felipe, who has chosen to attend university in Colombia, where it’s always summer—knows winter as… a definite factor in his decision to study in a warmer climate.

It is one thing to know something IS. It is another to know something AS.

When I first heard Kirstin’s quote, she spoke of matters of faith, and I immediately thought of my own examples. Like this one: God, I trust you. This simple phrase has been saving my life for a decade or more. Although trusting God is a concept I’ve known from childhood, there was a very definite time in my life—boys were entering their teenaged years, and I was faced with a crazy new season of letting go—when something shifted. I experienced trust. Suddenly this thing I’d long know is, I now knew as.

A few years later, Felipe and Jimmy joined our family, and I experienced God’s goodness. The first several months (probably longer) were full of challenges—fear, and food, and finding our way as a new kind of family—and God was Good. I began to take note, in a journal, writing it down. Every day, a list, of God’s provision. Evidence of this thing I’d always known is, and now I knew, in the most tangible ways—as.

Which brings me to a current example, and the real inspiration for writing this post.

Yesterday morning, Valentine Sunday, we Minnesotans were experiencing winter as. Double digits below zero; and church was cozy blankets and a blazing fire in our sun-filled house. Kyle listened through earbuds to an online service, while I opted for reading a book. My husband, occasionally getting up to stoke the fire, wondered out loud if “that book you’re reading is particularly funny?” It wasn’t. LOL. But apparently I’d been laughing out loud.

At myself.

Later explaining...

The day before, Saturday, at lunch with my sister, I received this text from my third-born son:

Have you read God Has a Name by John Mark? It’s your blog post in book form.

Later I called him. (Nils, not John Mark.) “Yeah. I think I have that book on Kindle.”

“Mom. Have you read it?!”

Funny thing…I had.

So. Last week’s blog post—The Key to Everything—is all about how God has a name, and, "This should be the sermon everyone’s preaching." God is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness…

And I said this, too:

Of course, it might be I wasn’t paying attention. It happens this way, like it or not. The epiphany comes, the light turns on, and there it is, plain as the nose on your face, and it’s everywhere. And you feel the fool for never seeing it it before.

Because. There it is. The laugh-out-loud difference between knowing something is, and knowing it as.

Valentine morning, I’m reading this book on Kindle for the second time. Chuckling to myself, because Nils was right. Plain as the nose on your face. Not only a sermon, but an entire book, and I’d already read it, less than two years ago. Probably thinking, all this is true.

Blown away now, reading it AS.