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I have been thinking lately about how quickly we finish stories—not necessarily the stories we read, but the stories unfolding around us. We see a news story on TV about a woman who has killed her children, and almost immediately the explanations begin. We hear that a politician has had an affair and decide we understand what kind of person he is and why he did it. We learn that a young man has died by suicide, and people begin searching for the thing that explains why: the breakup, the pressure, the depression, the last conversation, the thing someone should have noticed. We gather the pieces available to us and begin assembling them into a story that makes sense.
Perhaps we do this because unfinished stories are difficult to live with. We want cause and effect. We want behavior to have an explanation and tragedy to have a reason. But there is a difference between knowing facts about a person’s story and knowing the whole of that story. The woman on the news has a history we do not know. The politician has motives and contradictions we cannot see. The young man had an interior life that no headline, social media post, interview, or final conversation can fully reveal. We may know something true about what happened without knowing everything that is true about the person who lived it.
The same thing happens much closer to home. Someone does not respond when we expected them to. Someone reacts in a way we do not understand. A conversation takes an unexpected turn, or a person makes a decision that surprises us. Almost before we realize it, we begin supplying what we cannot actually see: why she did that, what he meant, what kind of person someone is, where this is going.
Sometimes we may even be right. That may be part of what makes this so difficult to recognize. Our conclusions are rarely invented out of nothing. They are built from experience, patterns we have observed, things people have said or done, and what happened the last time. But I am beginning to wonder whether being right about part of something can sometimes make it harder to remain curious about the rest of it.
I noticed this while returning to the scene in Mark 5 that I wrote about recently. Jairus has come to Jesus because his daughter is dying. Jesus agrees to go with him, but along the way a woman who has suffered from bleeding for twelve years reaches through the crowd and touches His clothes. She is healed, and Jesus stops.
Almost everyone in the scene seems to understand what should happen next. Jairus needs Jesus to keep moving. The woman seems to believe she can receive what she needs without interrupting Him. The disciples cannot understand why Jesus would ask who touched Him when a crowd is pressing against Him from every direction. Eventually, messengers arrive from Jairus’ house with the conclusion that seems most reasonable of all: his daughter has died. There is no longer any reason to trouble Jesus.
What strikes me is that none of these responses is irrational. Each makes perfect sense within the boundaries of what that person knows and can see. A father knows his daughter is running out of time. A woman knows she has received the healing she came for. The disciples know that dozens of people are touching Jesus. The messengers know that a child who was dying has now died. They are not wrong about what they know.
They simply do not know the whole.
I wonder how often the same thing happens in the conclusions I reach. The problem may not be that what I know is false. It may be that what I know is partial, and partial knowledge has a way of becoming certainty when I stop remembering its limits. Somewhere along the way, “This is what I can see” quietly becomes “This is all there is to see.”
I do this with people more easily than I would like to admit. Familiarity can convince me that I know someone well enough to anticipate the explanation before hearing it. I recognize the pattern. I remember the history. None of that knowledge is necessarily wrong, but it can begin filling in the spaces that belong to another person. I become so certain of what I already know that I stop paying attention to what is actually in front of me.
I can do the same thing with circumstances. I look at what has happened so far and begin drawing conclusions about what is possible from here. An opportunity has passed. Too much time has been lost. Something did not unfold the way I expected, and I begin treating my interpretation of what happened as though it also tells me what happens next.
And I suspect I do this with God, too. I bring Him my very human understanding of timing, urgency, possibility, success and failure, and without meaning to, begin expecting Him to operate within it. In Mark 5, the messengers are correct that Jairus’ daughter has died. What they cannot see is that their accurate understanding of the situation has led them to an inaccurate conclusion about Jesus: there is no reason to trouble Him anymore.
That distinction has stayed with me.
Perhaps learning to see more clearly does not require me to distrust what I know. It asks me to hold what I know with enough humility to recognize that knowing something truly is not the same thing as knowing it completely. I can exercise discernment and remain curious. I can recognize patterns without assuming they tell me everything about the person in front of me. I can acknowledge what is true about a circumstance without assuming I know everything that remains possible within it.
Maybe that is why the question I keep returning to is not simply, what do I see? It is also, what have I already decided I know?
There is a difference between knowing something and believing I have exhausted it. There is a difference between knowing a person and assuming there is nothing left to discover. And surely there is a difference between knowing Christ truly and imagining that the Christ I presently understand is the fullness of who He is.
Familiarity is not fullness.
Perhaps one of the ways we learn to see again is by leaving enough room in what we know for wonder.
September 4, 2026. Originally published on LinkedIn.