Knowing

Spiritual reflection to start the day with Bryan Kerr, a Church of Scotland Minister in Kilmacolm, Inverclyde.
Script: Good morning. I had coffee recently with an old friend I hadn't seen in almost five years. We sat down, ordered, and within two minutes we were mid-sentence, mid-laugh, mid-argument, as if the gap hadn't happened. No update, no awkward filling-in. Just the conversation we'd always had, picked up exactly where we'd left it.

That's what knowing someone actually feels like. Not a file of facts or a CV in your head, but something deeper and slower, built up over years, that doesn't ask to be explained.

The American writer Barbara Brown Taylor has said that the things that matter most aren't really known by being studied. They're known by being lived through. You don't learn a friendship from a book. You don't master a relationship. You don't graduate from a long companionship. You just keep walking alongside the person, and over the years a different kind of knowing grows in you.

For people of Christian faith, knowing Jesus is meant to work like that. Not a set of doctrines to tick off, or a quiz to pass; but a long companionship, with quiet periods and difficult periods and periods where you can't see the path at all. The knowing comes slowly, the way all real knowing does. There are days you feel it most acutely, and days you wonder if you ever knew anything at all. Both are part of the same long walk.

And you don't have to be religious to recognise this. There are things in every life that you only come to know by sticking around long enough to let them teach you. A child; a craft; a piece of music; a grief. The people who love us best are usually the ones who've been around long enough not to need our explanations.
God who knows us through and through, give us the patience to know, and to be known, slowly. Amen.