It is 6:40AM and I am sitting on an old sofa that is situated facing at a blank wall; this is not what you might think of as a traditional furniture arrangement, but it is absolutely intentional. You might, if you were to enter this room for the first time, think that the sparse and somewhat awkward arrangement of furniture was due to the fact that the room is located in a condo, owned by a young bachelor, who has as little design sense as he has money.

What you may not know, is that arrangement in that room is both intentional and purposeful; because behind the ratty, ancient sofa, beyond the small white oak dinette set, in a small built-in bookcase, is a shelf that holds the key to understanding the large blank wall opposite the sofa. On the second shelf from the top, among a collection of books about the Christian life and Christ and the Church–is a box. If you didn’t look closely at the shelf, you might never notice a small number of wires that snake their way behind the books and emerge from a small gap in the corner to cascade down from the glossy white shelf, along the beige textured wall, to the floor–if you did see them, you wouldn’t probably suspect that some sort of technology that is fed by those wires.

On that shelf opposite the large blank wall is a magical box that has the power to change the boring and blank into something colorful, bright and full of life. An ingenious collection of technology has offered up a way for a young bachelor to turn his 14 foot wall into a giant TV screen. Until the magic is conjured, you may even be puzzled by the small black boxes positioned like odd rectangular satellites throughout the room; but once a complex set of sequences is performed on a varying collection of remote controls the value of such an awkwardly arranged room become abundantly clear. As the image of William Wallace comes alive on wall, the small black boxes enrich the atmosphere as polyphonic life escapes–suddenly the room is a digital cinema and everything makes sense.

I find it amazing what happens in our mind when we don’t have the bigger picture. How often we misinterpret what we see around us, because some critical piece of the puzzle is missing or unobservable to us. Today, I awoke with a profound sense of how much I don’t know and don’t see. So much of what is going on in my life seems unobservable to me; it that the longer I live life, the less it seems I really know.

Yesterday, I flew into Phoenix after having been away for about a year. For seven years, Phoenix was my home and I have a great deal of history here. As time rolls on, I find that when I return to visit someplace that I’ve left, the experience is always bittersweet. There is a sense of familiarity in an old hometown which, for me, can be either comforting or haunting; at the moment, Phoenix holds a little of both. I still have plenty of friends and people that I care about in Phoenix, but at the same time, it holds also many ghosts of the past.

One “ghost” that Phoenix holds for me is my old church. Many of the people that I will visit with while I am here are members of my old church, so there is no way to escape the haunting. Maybe “haunting” is a bit extreme of a word to use to describe it, I guess a ghost can be something that haunts, but I think that often they can also be a “familiar spirit” that is a vague reminder of the past. For me the vague reminder, the familiar spirit, brings me right back here to my friend’s condo in this room with the large blank wall.

I have had a long history of misinterpreting my life. Just when I think that I know something, a previously unobservable thing will present itself and cause me to reevaluate the way that I understand that thing. One of my largest personal failures in life was to believe that I actually knew something–truth be told, I thought that I knew a lot of things.

One of the categories that I thought that I knew well was the Bible. I thought I had a good handle on what the Bible was about and who Christ was and what He did and what He was trying to do with His church. My church was a largely responsible for this, or probably more accurately, the ministry that my church was associated with was.

In some way, I think that my know-it-all personality is one of the personality types that finds itself attracted to a ministry that seems to have a corner on the proper interpretation of the Bible and I feel that I became an example of that of that type of abnormality. I certainly don’t want to convey the idea that my old church, or the ministry it is under, is just a group of know-it-alls or that their opinion that the have the most accurate interpretation of the Bible is errant; what I do know, is that I don’t know anything.

My previous manor of know-it-all living caused me to speak in most often in definitives. I don’t think, in my mind, I wasn’t so much “telling” people something as much as it was, more likely, I was challenging people to tell me something I didn’t know. In my mind, if somebody knows something that is true and someone else speaks something that not true or inaccurate, the person with the truth has the obligation to declare the truth. My technique, as flawed as it was, simply eliminated people who “thought” they knew something and favored people with reasoned belief in what they knew… and had the guts to speak up.

I know that all that sounds really heady, I recognize that now. I also recognize how many people I alienated and put-off with my verbal diarrhea of asserted facts, or should I say, “fact challenges.” The Bible is an incredibly complex book, if you want to distill it into a systematized theology, you will have more than a single life’s work ahead of you. If you are lazy, you will simply make random observations, apply your personal hypothesis and declare something as true. Over the last five years or so, I’ve begun to come to a conclusion the value of the Bible is not so much in the knowing, but the seeking.

Sometimes, what you know allows you to unlock doors and understand things in a deeper or more complete way, but according to my experience, what people know or probably more accurately, think they know, tends to be the thing that keeps them from seeking. I personally experienced this as I began to accumulate large amounts of doctrinal knowledge. In my pre-knowledge days, I felt a huge commonality with other Christians, but as my knowledge grew, I felt more and more disconnected from them and began to feel more strongly the need to tell them where they are wrong.

I think that it was much like walking into my friend’s room with the blank wall. I know that he is a bachelor and that he doesn’t have piles of money; if I didn’t know that he had a digital cinema, it would be really easy for me to draw a number of conclusions about his decorating skills. It is the things that we do know that allow us to come to conclusions, but it is the things that we don’t know that cause us to make conclusions that are misinformed and often incorrect.

In recent days, it wouldn’t necessarily be true to say that I don’t know the Bible or don’t know things in general, but I have had a complete realignment in my thinking–I no longer think that my conclusions are correct and I am continually seeking to understand things more completely. The way the change is manifested, is that I rarely make definitive statements any more, and when I do, I often catch myself and rephrase something to leave a degree of uncertainty on the table.

However, what I am finding, it that people that came to me for advice and counsel have begun to be less comforted by advice. In the days when I made declarations with a high degree of certainty, there was something that was often comforting about something asserted with confidence. I feel in a world full of blowing winds, where the health value of eggs, coffee and wine change with every new medical study, people are looking for something certain to anchor themselves to. In a crazy twist of irony, I think that my change for what I assume is for the better has undermined a level of stability in my life.

I think my new mentality has offended fewer people, but also offered fewer people comfort and confidence. I don’t think that my personal experience is that far off from the Christian faith. Churches that make their teachings as simple and broad so as not to offend, offer little anchorage for those that require spiritual stability and certainty. This mentality has even caused some churches to adopt eastern philosophies and endorse multiple “paths” of spirituality.

On the opposite side, churches that make bold declarations that their faith and biblical interpretations are uniquely correct and superior offer little in the way of preventing offense of others and actually create the most severe divisions, but, those are the groups that give their members that strongest anchor and certainty.

Much like my friend’s blank wall, the truth is somewhere in the middle. The layout in the room with the blank wall is both the result of the need to support his digital cinema and the fact that he is a bachelor with little money and design sense. Like most things, they truth is somewhere in the middle. As I interact with the familiar spirits of the past, I am reminded that there were many great things that anchored me in my Christian walk, things that encouraged me and provided security and stability,

But with all of the positives, came the ugly truth that in much of my certainty and security, I became an unapproachable know-it-all. My latest experiences have taken me to new places and forced my to reconsider what I actually know. In a cycle of teardown and rebuilding I am rediscovering a seeking heart; the lack of certainty has stirred the seeking. The difference now is that I don’t trust any kind of teaching to be that cornerstone of my confidence. The knowledge that I seek now can not be found in any bound collection of words or in any man’s speaking. Maybe this is the intention of the Bible; so many writers, so many voices and nothing that seems systematic in its presentation. I think 2 Corinthians 3:6b carries the sentiment, “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” The words we read and the speaking we hear aren’t answers in themselves, they are simply those things that conduct us to the proper place to find our stability and confidence… the Spirit.

Right now, sitting alone in a room, it is becoming clear to me that my knowledge isn’t what should give me the confidence in my faith. By not resting in doctrinal knowledge I am able to be free in my fellowship with other believers, knowing that it isn’t the knowledge of some fact that gives me confidence, but a seeking heart that leads to the Spirit which gives life.

When I think back on my life, the further back I go, the more fond the memories are. There is something inherently safe about being a child and being taken care of. As a young child, your job is simply to live, all the anxieties of life don’t concern you… as well they shouldn’t. But that is the thing about getting older, growing up; the older you get, the more there is to worry about. In recent years, I felt overwhelmed with responsibility and concern for the future. I had a great job, a reasonable mortgage and a big car payment on my new truck, a terminally ill father and I lived on the opposite side of the county from the rest of my family. To top it all off, I was deeply unsettled at my church and was also struggling to hear God’s voice in my life.

At the time, I considered my life a rudderless ship being blown carelessly by the wind and tossed about by reckless crashing swells. I felt out of control and anxiety weighed on me enough to require medication to control the frequent occurrence of panic attacks. Things seemed to be changing in my life at a record pace and I had no idea where I was headed and, at some level, I felt helpless to change my situation. My great paying job was something I no longer enjoyed and at times, even disdained. I was physically, emotionally and spiritually unsettled and the sense of pending doom prevailed enough to keep me in a constant depressed funk. I felt trapped in some chaotic tempest–that was until a chance to travel to Kenya to shoot documentary video footage gave me the taste of something new.

At the the end of November 2005, I began an adventure of a lifetime to Kenya, Africa; at the time however, it didn’t seem much like an adventure. I always had a concept of what an adventure was–in my mind it is always fun and exciting, but that’s not how real adventures begin–a real adventure always begins with peril. My adventure began with a delay at the airport as security picked my video equipment apart enough for me to almost miss my flight. You would think that almost missing something wasn’t much of a peril, but the fact that I was the last person on the flight meant that all of the overhead storage was filled and I was forced to check $6,000 worth of video equipment at the gate. That wasn’t the end of it, before I was to arrive in Kenya I would lose my video equipment, miss my connecting flight to Amsterdam, get stuck in Minnesota in November with only a short sleeve shirt on, miss meeting up with the rest of my party in Amsterdam, fly into Kenya alone with no way to contact anyone and end up $2 short on the cash fee to get my visa endorsement to enter into the country.

For a person who was prone to anxiety, depression and sudden bouts of panic attacks, the beginning of the adventure didn’t leave me in ruin, it actually set me free. When I stood at the carousel in Minnesota waiting for my video equipment, the anxiety began to build, I felt sick at my stomach and the sense of doom wrapped around me like a heavy wet blanket. Eventually, I was the last one left standing as the gears and belts eased to a stop and the realization the my video equipment was not there began to grip me. Like a punch in the stomach, I was left without breath an deflated.

As the idea of losing my equipment settled in, a dark depression overcame me and the feeling of retreat built–all I wanted to do was go back home to Phoenix. But if I had given up, the adventure would have been diminished and the release never experienced. A helpful employee at the airport (and probably the only helpful employee at Northwest Airlines) searched for my gear. In a last ditch effort, the employee fired up the carousel in the long shot that the bag was stuck somewhere in the bowels of the mechanical monster. After a moment of fruitless spinning, the monster belched up a blue PortaBrace equipment bag and the first reward of peril raised its head.

After being reunited with my equipment, the anxiety fog lifted and wet blanket of depression sloughed off like skin from a ripe boiled tomato. Suddenly peril was something to be overcome and not feared and the rest of what would become my African adventure was underway. When I returned home to Phoenix, it was clear to me that it was time to for me to leave. The storm that I experienced during my trip helped me find my rudder and aided in the rigging of the sails properly to power through the breaking waves. The next four months would pass quickly, I would beat the collapsing housing bubble in Phoenix and ended up with six full price offers on the first weekend that my house was listed. My transition from Phoenix to Nashville was smooth and I felt full of purpose and intention–four full sails to the wind and cruising at an even keel.

A year has passed and I find myself in a completely different state. I left my well paying job in November and began a planned three month hiatus in attempts to explore some creative outlets. During that time, several film projects went bust and almost nothing that I intended to do, got done. Now it has been six months since I left my job and I am still on hiatus, taking only a single web job in attempts to reverse the cash flow. For six months almost nothing has happened–well, that isn’t true, quite a lot has happened. What started as a creative hiatus, became a personal exploration that would lead me to personal revelations and force me to set new boundaries.

For such a long time, I felt tossed about and rudderless, now I find myself in quite a different state– completely motionless. Recently, I began to struggle with the sense of stillness in my life. I felt like a ship in dead water; no wind, no waves and no peril. For some, this might be a desirable state of being, but for me, it makes me restless. Nothing seems more useless than a ship in listless waters and I have been letting this state of being bother me; I yearn again for an adventure.

The other day, I had lunch with my pastor, and as often occurs in conversation with him, the vein of conversation finds just the groove that it needs to find. At some point in the conversation, I offered up my metaphor of the listless ship and explained that I have recently been feeling like I was trapped in dead waters. What I received as a response, caught me by surprise. It was suggested that I was reading the signals incorrectly. Perhaps instead of a ship at sea with no wind and furled sails restlessly waiting for change, I was safely docked at port repairing damage and preparing for the next voyage–something about that resonated with me.

It’s amazing what a change of perspective can do for you. I often find myself in a negative mindset, this is something that I have actively been working on, but this simple fresh look at what is going on in my life has allowed me to switch from restlessness to eagerness. I am now gaining a new perspective on what I believed was wasted months and it is turning out to be a period of structural repair work as I prepare a new journey ahead. While there is a new sense of eager hopefulness, I think that there will always be that sense of restlessness, I want to know where I am headed on this next major journey of life. Sometimes being uncertain about something can cause you to be still and listen; well, I am listening and hopefully knowing that I may be safely docked in one of life harbors might give me the opportunity to permit that still quiet voice to speak something exciting into my life.