Something I Don’t Know (Tell Me)

Tell me, tell me, tell me
Something I don’t know…something I don’t know…
– Selena Gomez

The catchy chorus from this teen radio hit often gets stuck in my head. I’m not a fan of the song, but the concept always conjures up interesting thoughts.

First of all, we are humans and we are very greedy. That which we have does not satisfy us; that which we do not have intrigues and entices us. Take knowledge for example: we are eager to have it but are often slow to apply it. Or we want to be smart, but don’t want to study.

My mom likes to remind me of my early days of learning to play piano. Apparently I would cry whenever I tried to play a new song, and could not do it perfectly the first time. (Many tears were shed upon that little keyboard!) But I wanted to play it COMPLETELY, and I wanted to play it NOW. And I didn’t want hours of practice in between.

Talk about wanting instant gratification at an early age!

Flash forward some odd years later: I still want instant gratification. This week I’ve had several mornings with eerily similar scenarios. It begins with me in my pajamas, dragging my purple Bible over to join my coffee on the table. I scoot my chair up, open haphazardly to Psalms or Philippians (usually) and drily pray for God to enlighten me.

Now, to be fair, sometimes God does go flash-boom-pow-revelation. Just like that. And that’s awesome when it happens.

But sometimes I have to work for it. And sometimes He doesn’t tell me something I don’t know; sometimes He makes me review the things I do know, and have failed to apply. Just ’cause I memorized “Cast all your cares upon Him” and “Pray without ceasing” and “Rejoice always” in AWANA doesn’t mean I am always diligent in applying the knowledge. In fact, sometimes I just don’t want to pray, and I don’t want to rejoice, and all I want is for God to make me feel good so I can close the book and proceed with my day.

That’s the sad, disgusting truth.

The flipside, though, is that sometimes God makes us review what we’ve learned before He teaches us something new. My Algebra teacher did that to our high school class–we were halfway through the book and she decided to make us review the entire first half again before continuing on. We didn’t finish the book that year, but we sure understood the concepts better! Similarly, God seems to be more interested in giving us firm foundations than a speed read.

Sometimes we just need to go back a few chapters.

“We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.”
– Hebrews 2:1