How many things do we know by heart? Perhaps the way to get home, or our mom’s recipe for chocolate chip cookies, or the lyrics to a favorite song. But God — how do we go about knowing God by heart?
First, we need to differentiate knowing God through our mind versus through our heart. The mind wants to understand God — who God is, what God does, what God wants. The heart, on the other hand, wants to experience God, to be with God, as Jesus did when he went apart from others to pray.
Knowing God by heart necessarily requires spending a lot of time with God. To learn a song by heart, we sing it over and over; to learn a recipe by heart, we make it time and time again; to know the way home by heart, we follow the same path until it is ingrained in us. We can never know the depths of anyone we love, much less God, but that isn’t necessary to know someone by heart. What is necessary is to be present and listen, day after day, week after week, year after year. When we do that with God, people will also say of us after we die, “She knew God by heart.”
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