Beyond Lists

By Wil Triggs

New Year’s is the time of lists—maybe it’s the best things that happened in the year just ending—the best tv shows, movies, books, restaurants. I’m kind of a sucker for those lists. I’m interested to find out the best of what people experienced this last year. Making lists helps me keep track of my own discoveries.

What were my best books read this past year? What about movies watched? Best new restaurants of 2023. I’ve been scouring media to find out what other people name as their bests of 2023—books, movies, podcasts, restaurants, theater, television.

A friend of mine recently told me that he made a list of things he loves about his wife. This is not a list limited to 2023, but over the course of their life together.

That’s a great idea, I said to myself, as we were talking about it. So, I decided to make one of my own for Lorraine.

I won’t share it with you now, but if you are reading this and know her, it’s not hard to come up with great things about her. There’s her laugh, her sense of humor, her love of children, her commitment to God and his Word. Her astute mind. Oh wait, I said I wasn’t going to share my list with you.

Think of someone in your life and make a list of things you love about that person. Then share it with him/her. We all have someone like that in our lives, even if it’s just one person. It’s fun and a great way to start 2024.

If you read my list about Lorraine, first you would find out things about me. After all, I’m choosing what I put on the list, and it ismylist about Lorraine. Then you would also find out about her, through my eyes at least. But that doesn’t mean you would really know either of us. No matter how extensively I might catalog her many delights, I cannot really capture the three-dimensional living, breathing, laughing, thinking, writing, caring, carefree sacrificially loving person that she is, not to mention the triple ginger soft cookies she bakes.

There I go again, sharing what I said I would not share.

Here's the thing. Reading my lists or anyone’s at year end is not the same as going to the places, reading the books, eating in the restaurants, watching the movies or knowing a person like I know Lorraine. Knowing all those great things about Lorraine isn’t the same as truly knowing her.

Sometimes I think people imagine that learning things about God is the same as really knowing him. Yes, there is such a thing as an agnostic theologian, but we must not fall for that.

Of course, we do teach virtues, graces, fruits of the Spirit, and the sins and vices we see in God’s Word. I don’t mean that the things we learn about God cannot help us. But learning the lists and living by them is not the same as knowing the Three Persons.

There were many people around Jesus who thought they were on the right track. And yet Jesus said: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’" (Matthew 7: 21-23)

This is a little scary for a fan of lists like me. I read books, listen to podcasts, lead discussions and studies, all of it focused in one way or another on God. I list his attributes, but to be honest, sometimes I concentrate more on knowing things about God than on knowing him.

We fail, but God never does. Not once. The good news is that God wants us to know him. So much so that he came and died and rose. He makes himself known. It’s not hard to know him, yet it is the most demanding thing of all. To yield our souls, to give ourselves, and trust him beyond ourselves. It’s impossible for me to do.

But I know someone for whom it is possible. And honestly, he has already done the heavy lifting. The wonders of Christ and his Word are open to us. Not as a list or a set of things to do, but as a person to know. A close friend or a spouse, these are but images to help us understand what it means to know him.

May 2024 be a year where we know God in new, deeper, richer ways than ever before and let our lives make a prayer of Paul’s words: “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”

Paul doesn’t say knowing about God. It’s knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. What a never-ending gift. At the end of his gospel, John wrote, “Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” (John 21:25).

This is staggering. All the books of the world could not contain the works of Jesus, yet we get to know him. This beloved apostle also penned an even more staggering truth when, he wrote “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2)

As God’s children now, we have Scripture—always new and fresh, open to us, by the Spirit of God, alive today in this moment and worth more than everything else we know and love.

And one day we will see him as he is.