Fariza

“My goal is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, so that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Colossians 2:2-3

The longer I follow Christ, the more I realize how little I truly know Him, and yet, with every passing year, my desire to know Him only grows deeper.

Twenty-five years ago, I began following the man named Jesus of Nazareth. I was eleven years old, fresh out of a sect of Islam, starting at the edge of something I could not fully comprehend. I had no theology, no church tradition, no agenda — just an encounter I could not explain and a powerful pull I could not resist. I thought that was the beginning of understanding Him.

I had no idea it was the beginning of being undone by Him.

Every time I think of that summer in 2001 when the power of the Holy Spirit overwhelmed me, and my little, frail teenage body couldn’t handle it, causing me to fall to my knees — it feels as though it were yesterday.

Now, years later, each day still feels new. Like I am meeting Him for the first time. The more I know, the more I realize how little I actually know, and I have stopped being unsettled by that.

I live to know Him.

I have dedicated my entire life to following Him, and I live for the day when I am reunited with the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

But while I’m still here, the journey here has required me to open my hands, humble my heart, and open my mind to the unending mysteries of His character.

I have been challenged to open my mind…

I used to hold certain things very tightly, assuming this is exactly who He is, because it is written right here in this book. But the Father, in His infinite wisdom, began to slowly and gently tell me not to put Him in a box.

I believed that sincerity plus enough Scripture meant you could arrive at the definitive shape of God. I believed that people who wandered into mystery or sat too long with unanswered questions simply hadn’t studied hard enough. I was not kind about it. And certainly, I have learned, it can be its own kind of idol worship.

Then he started surprising me.

Not with doctrical reversals or dramatic deconstructions – but in quieter ways. In a moment of worship in a familiar charismatic setting, I felt His nearness in a form I hadn’t expected. In conversation with someone from a tradition I had written off, I suddenly heard something true and pure. In a season of suffering where all my tidy worldviews fell apart and what remained was Him and His bride — the One who has been there for the past 2000 years. I was not alone; I had the legion of saints who had been praying for me this entire time.

“Where have you been all my life?” I keep telling myself.

Sanctification, I understand, is not a destination I was steadily approaching. It is a lifelong process of uncovering the grace of God. Theosis is not a ladder I climb; it is something He does not me — slowly, in ways I never could have reasoned my way into.

The longer I walk with Him, the less appetite I have for debate or anything that this world has to offer. For theologizing, for sparring, for proving. I spent years in rooms where the sharpest argument won and assumed that was faithfulness.

Now I find myself just sitting at the feet of Jesus.

To be childlike again. To return to the beautiful, irreducible simplicity of the Gospel.

When I scroll through the world, and I mean that literally, the endless feed of it, I see people exhausting themselves. Fighting over policies that will shift, celebrities who will fade, wars that break hearts, and rumors of wars that multiply overnight. I understand the impulse. I have been in those arguments. I have typed those paragraphs and have emotionally vomited on an Instagram story. But there is a weariness in all of it that I recognize now, a hunger that the noise cannot feed.

And I find myself wondering: What does the Father think when He looks at all of this? What goes through His mind? He exists outside of time, yet His Spirit is here — present in real time, in the middle of all of it, in the grief and the chaos and the beauty we keep missing.

I wonder if He can’t wait to come back.

I wonder, and I wonder.