Confessions of a recovering know-it-all

In the past month or so, I’ve had at least three dreams about a former co-worker. For purposes of this blog, I’ll call her Susan. Susan was like the crazy fun aunt that everyone needs. She was old enough to be my mom, smart as a whip, and seasoned to perfection by a colorful life of inevitably instructive circumstances. A single mom who essentially lost her combat veteran husband to the thief known as PTSD, she carried an undue amount of weight on her shoulders, and she made no effort to pretend it was a cakewalk. She was raw and funny and appropriately bitter when life punched her in the face.

Susan was possessed of incurable smartassery, and I loved her for it. Hers were eyes that saw straight to the heart of a matter, and she didn’t suffer fools or BS for very long. We shared an office for awhile, which gave her a front row seat to my rapidly deconstructing life. She witnessed my entire trajectory from chronically depressed and somewhat manic young woman to single mom in crisis to married woman caught in abuse and trauma cycles. She knew I was a hot mess, but she never felt the need to tell me so. She had the wisdom to give me space to figure it the heck out because she also knew I was hard-headed enough to have to learn my hard lessons on my own.

What makes me cringe, in retrospect, is my awareness of just how hypocritical my life and witness must have looked to Susan back then. Here I was, the YMCA Mission Director, tasked with running small groups to help other adults find healing in their lives while, behind closed doors, I was deeply enmeshed in a co-dependent cycle of abuse from which I couldn’t seem to find the strength to break free myself. I would write inspirational stories and messages in our weekly staff email and offer to pray for people, and it was all sincere, of course, but there had to have been at least some sense for a seeing person that the blind was leading the blind.

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I regret not having the self-awareness or humility to honestly name the discrepancy back then. I think my witness as a struggling, raw, and broken woman full of equal parts doubt and faith would have been an infinitely kinder way for me to show up in the lives of people I cared about than putting on a front and pretending to have all the answers when I didn’t.

But it took me a long while to realize that being a good Christian doesn’t mean you have all the answers. I grew up in a faith tradition that prioritizes knowledge above almost all else. Knowledge ABOUT God was something of a surrogate for a relationship WITH God, and it led me to some really maladaptive places of striving where I felt like I had to perform my way into God’s approval, and having all the answers became an idolatrous safety net that absolved me of my obligation to wrestle with uncertainty and doubt and gray areas. To others, it registers as arrogance, but it’s really insecurity.

You know the sort of annoying stereotype of the sheltered homeschool/private school kid devoid of any social skills or the ability to navigate life in the real world?

For me, it wasn’t a stereotype; it was reality. My loving parents sacrificed a great deal to send me to private Christian school, and I’m exceptionally grateful for the sacrifice, but it wasn’t without its drawbacks.

I didn’t realize how dramatically out of place I was among peer-aged individuals until my sophomore year in high school when I made the varsity basketball team at the local public school and was thrust into a world full of peers with whom I had nothing in common. They wore American Eagle and had professional highlights in their hair. I wore French braids and highwater khakis from JC Penney. They read Seventeen Magazine and filled out the little quizzes inside. I explicated poetry and prepared to defend the five points of Calvinism.

I was a fish out of water and did not know how to bridge the gap. It was incredibly dysregulating for me. I longed to be cool like these girls, but I couldn’t even hang in a basic conversation about life or boys or fashion because I was so pre-programmed to over-spiritualize absolutely everything. The questions of “Who am I?” and “What is my purpose here?” underscored every conversation I ever engaged. And, void of any sense of personal identity outside my religious roots, I concluded that I must be on mission. I was clearly sent here by God to Bible thump everyone into agreement with my faith. It was my job to save everyone. I, and I alone, possessed the answers, and these lost people needed me to point them back on the straight and narrow.

If you’re cringing as you read this, it’s okay. It’s painful for me to even type this because, arrogance and ignorance and naivete aside, I can promise you my heart toward the whole ordeal was actually pure. It wasn’t wrong for me to want to share my faith with others. It wasn’t wrong of me to try to be obedient to what I believed God was asking me to do. And even today at almost 42 years old, I still believe Jesus is the solution to absolutely everything.

But I wasn’t sharing from an abundance of freedom anchored in Christ’s love. I was sharing from a place of insecurity and identity crisis that latched onto religion as a cover for my deficits. As long as I had the answers for everything that actually mattered, my inadequacies in other basic life skills could be overlooked. I used my knowledge about Jesus as a mask for myself rather than a lifeline for others who, quite frankly, never signed on to become one of my personal projects, nor should they have been drawn to whatever it is I was offering them.

And I continued to amass knowledge to use as a shield throughout my entire young adulthood. The more I knew, the more unassailable I imagined myself to be. Even as my life began to unravel, I still convinced myself that my knowledge would save me. But it didn’t. And Susan could see this. She didn’t have much use for what I was selling. And I did not have the basic common sense to realize that, in this relationship, she was the one who had things to teach me. I was the one who needed to learn.

This default to knowledge as an identity is not uncommon in Reformed theological traditions where there’s a very real reason adherents are seen as know-it-all snobs who would try to solve world hunger with the Heidelberg catechism if possible. Everything neat and tidy and orderly and in its place, including God, tucked neatly into a box small enough for us to predict and ultimately control. It’s a perfect recipe for fearful control freaks, even the well-intended ones, but it leaves no room for miracles or gray areas or wrestling — no room for an all powerful God to knock your socks off or surprise you in any way. And it ends up being stifling and suffocating when it’s supposed to be life-giving.

A few weeks ago I watched a film called “Conclave,” which details the selection process for the new pope following the death of the old one. I ultimately didn’t care for the overall message of the movie, but its thesis, as delivered by the main character in a sermon to conclave attendees, stuck with me. This is what he said:

“Let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. ‘Eli Eli, lama sabachtani?’ He cried out in His agony at the ninth hour on the cross. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.”

I have wrestled with this sentiment ever since.

I want to add a “Yes, but” to the conversation. When certainty is rooted in a lie that’s baked into oppressive dogma, then yes, absolutely it’s a terrible thing. BUT … moral relativism and uncertainty on matters that are objectively true can also lead people off a cliff. Truth claims all hinge on the ability to claim certainty in at least some areas, so it’s fraught.

I will say that the older I get and the closer I draw to God, the more peace I feel in allowing a degree of mystery for complicated topics I may never fully understand. And the more I value the sanctifying process of wrestling with doubt and the humility it takes to say, “I honestly don’t know the answer, but I’ll pray for you to the One who does.”

This morning I noticed that, somewhere over the course of the last few years, Susan had dropped me as a friend on Facebook. And it made me sad. It’s probably my fault. I’m the one who dropped the ball or failed to lead with compassion. Or lacked humility in my passionate presentation of the truth I believe in. That’s on me. But if I could go back and change things, I would. I don’t think it’s wasted effort to say so.