In the last blog we noted that we must live something to really know it. There are multiple examples of this truth in our lives and we will discuss a few of them over the next few blogs.
I have just finished reading the science fiction novel The Martian: A Novel by Andy Weir. It is about an astronaut (Mark Watney) who is stranded on Mars with no way of communicating with earth and no means of getting back to earth. When Mark went to retrieve a RTG unit which was four kilometers from his living quarters (the Hab), he was out of sight of the Hab for the first time. He had been alone on Mars for 66 sols (Mar’s days) and had the intellectual knowledge he was alone on Mars. However, seeing “nothing but dust, rock, and endless empty desert in all directions” [1] and losing sight of the Hab which was his only evidence of civilization caused him to experience his loneliness in a way that mere intellectual knowledge could not. As Mark states: “But there’s a difference between knowing it and really experiencing it”. [2]
As I mentioned in my book, this was brought home to me when my wife’s sons gave us gift certificates to go sky diving. Reading about sky diving, watching videos about sky diving, and talking to people who had been sky diving was helpful but all this knowledge was nothing compared to the actual experience of sky diving.
So why do we think Christianity would be any different? Knowledge of Christianity (our beliefs about Christianity) is so very different from actually living the Christian life. We all know that the Bible teaches that we should love our neighbor as ourselves (Mark 12:33). That is knowledge. However, until we actually take some action that demonstrates that love toward our neighbor we truly do not know what it means to love our neighbor.
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[1] Andy Weir, The Martian, New York: Broadway Books (Random House LLC), 2014, Kindle edition, p. 74, location 1233.
[2] Weir, p. 75, location 1244.
