"And this is eternal life, that they know You the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent." -John 17:3

Three weeks to get to know Him. To sit at His feet and drink in His Word and gaze deeply into the face of the One who alone knows me.

And all I've learned yet is that I'll need this whole lifetime and more of sitting right here to fully know how much I don't know.

Is the eternal life so far out of reach if just now I'm realizing how little I know of Him? Is there a moment I can say, "Yes! I've done it! I have completed my study and He is known!"

Oh, no. "For who has known the mind of The Lord?" (Rom. 11:34)

Who has known? Who?

So, is this quest useless? Is even this pursuit of God a striving after wind. Is the Spirit just as elusive as the breeze? Is He determined to never be known?

But I cannot stop, or what else will I have? Chasing Life is better than sauntering in death.

Life. To know Him.

I want that.

And it has to be a desire stronger than all that is attached to it. Too often we want life for its hope, or for its happiness, or for its health. Life for life's sake is a lost value. He is life. Do we chase Him for His own sake? Would we, even if told we would never succeed in capturing the wind?

If. The conditional won't be fulfilled. Because we've already been told otherwise. He is life, but He also holds out hope and says, "... then [you] shall know fully, even as [you] have been fully known."

Fully known. And this is all our hope. Life is knowing Him - knowing the One who fully knows. So we chase Him. I'll chase. Not to catch hope, but spurred on by hope, to know that I am known.

Because He was sent.

Jesus Christ, my Knower, was sent to be filled full of the knowledge of all my sin sickness - to intimately know it. Then He was poured out - liquid love in the knowing. And knowing all, He forgave all.

Just before the spilling He knelt to pray. This is eternal life, He said. To know God as the intimate Knower who yet forgives in the knowing. Who presses arms on wood out wide and pushes sin as far as east from west until even the omniscient One can say, "your sin I remember no more." The Knower knows so well, He forgets.

Sitting here, at the feet of the Knower, I'm learning that realizing all I don't know is coming to realize the extent to which I have been known.