Even As Also I Am Known

In all the universe there’s only one creature that would turn and look God full in the face and offer to give him pointers about what he should do to make us like him better. And when we grow up we make the big decision about whether or not we will worship him. But the stars worship God day and night, without thinking. And our failure to automatically do so is strange, racked as we are with many tragic and ridiculous flaws. Our test of God’s goodness is whether or not he is willing and able to meet our needs as we see them, to save our skin when we’re in trouble, and help us to get a good job when we are unemployed. We size up his unshakeable moral laws from tiny hearts filled with lonely highways of corruption.
What makes us “tick” lies concealed from neighbors and spouses, and even from ourselves, but not from him. When we think we want a Corvette we really want a hug. Folks, we just don’t know ourselves very well. For our little mind is a many layered contraption, like seven layer dip. In the top part is our conscious mind from which we speak our opinions to everyone we meet, make demands for benefits and favors, order French fries, and make complaints. Then there is the unconscious of which we know little and have heard but rumors. In that part of the soul 24/7 sweep dangerous and vexing emotions which we try in vain to manage and conceal. And then further still beneath that is the vast and titanic body of forgotten and suppressed memory, rising in the night as we lay down to close our eyes, dominating us for six hours, holding us captive, and like the unseen mantle of our planet composing the overwhelming majority of our soul. It is forever encased in darkness, and is probably molten at the core. We know nothing of it, but is it the real “us”? There, at least, we are in fact, “out of control”, as our own dreams prove. Do you commit sin in your dreams? Are you responsible for these things? After all it is your mind they are going through. No wonder the prophet sang,
"The heart is deceitful above all things,
And desperately wicked;
Who can know it?
The question for me has always been, how then can we pray, not knowing our own state, or even who we really are? Who am I to tell God my needs, as if I know them and he doesn’t? Does he not know me far more completely than I do?
The answer is simple. Though we pray from small hearts filled with doubt and corruption we pray with faith into the great heart of God, and that heart is filled with eternal grace through the gift of his Son.
This thing bothered the Apostle Paul, and he wrote about it. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
To know, even as we are known: this is the sweetness of heaven, and for those who trust in God and the one he has sent, it is even now on the horizon, in the great scheme of things not many days away.