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There is a strange thing that happens when we become very familiar with something.
We stop seeing it.
We drive the same road so often that we no longer notice the buildings along the way. We move through the rooms of our homes without really looking at the things we once carefully chose to put there. We know the people closest to us so well that sometimes we see what we expect to see before we see what is actually there.
Familiarity is useful. It allows us to move through the world without having to encounter everything as though it were new. But I wonder if familiarity can also become a kind of blindness.
I have been thinking about this particularly as I read Scripture. There are stories some of us have known for most of our lives. We know Zacchaeus is going to climb the tree. We know there will not be enough food for the crowd—and then somehow there will be. We know the Samaritan will stop. We know Martha will be busy while Mary sits at the feet of Jesus.
Sometimes we know what a story means before we have even finished reading it.
Or at least we think we do.
There is comfort in knowing these stories. There should be. But there may also be a quiet danger in becoming so certain of what we already know that we stop expecting to see anything more.
Lately, I have been trying to read familiar passages more slowly. Not searching for something novel or trying to uncover a meaning no one has noticed before. Just resisting the impulse to rush toward what I already know.
And I am finding myself caught by details: a question I had skimmed past, a movement toward someone, a person standing at the edge of a story I had remembered only for its central character. The order in which something happens. The fact that Jesus stops. The fact that Jesus looks. The fact that Jesus asks a question when surely He already knows the answer.
None of these details changes the story. But sometimes they change the way I encounter it.
Perhaps that is because familiarity and fullness are not the same thing.
We can know something well and still not know all there is to know about it. That seems especially important when what—or Whom—we are trying to know is Christ.
There is no final reading in which we have exhausted Him. No point at which we can say, “Yes, I know this story,” and therefore assume there is nothing left for us to see.
And perhaps this extends beyond the pages of Scripture.
I wonder how often I do the same thing with people. I know her. I know what he is going to say. I know why she reacted that way. I know what kind of person he is.
Familiarity quietly becomes assumption. And assumption can make it very difficult to see what is actually in front of us.
Maybe part of seeing well is learning to hold what we know with enough humility to remain attentive to what we might have missed—to look again at the story, to look again at the person, to look again at Christ. Not because what we saw before was necessarily wrong, but because it was never the whole.
Familiarity is not fullness.
And perhaps one of the most hopeful things about learning to see is discovering how much there still is to behold.
August 21, 2026. Originally published on LinkedIn.