“I don’t know.”
Sometimes the best thing that any of us can say involves admitting our own ignorance. And as is often the case, doing that which is best can be challenging for us. After all, we like to know things. Or perhaps, to put it more accurately, we like to know things and be known as people who know things. Gossip is the result of our desire to let someone else know that we know something that they don’t. Yet at the same time, we all would like to think that the engineer who designed the airplane that we are flying in knows their stuff.
In our defense, we are wired to both know things and operate in a world where we lack information. Our brains have this remarkable capacity to take in all of the information that we can observe, and then fill in the unknowns in the manner that makes the most sense based upon what we do know. That process is almost automatic, so that if we miss one word in a conversation, we process the conversation as if we heard every syllable and proceed accordingly. We do the same thing when we’re driving, allowing for our experiences to shape our assumptions about whether or not it is safe to pull out into traffic. Since there is no way that we will ever know everything, we have to be able to function amidst the unknown, and our brains handle that part automatically.
So, we like to know things, we see value in knowing things, and our brains are wired in a way to make it seem like we know things even when we don’t. For those reasons, it can be challenging to identify what we are assuming versus what we actually know, and it can also be difficult to then admit that we don’t possess the information that we (and others) thought that we had. Ironically, by either not being aware of what we don’t know or not being willing to admit it, we can cause far more damage than if we confessed that there were limits to our knowledge.
Relationships are damaged when people misunderstand each other, thinking that they heard one thing when something else was actually said. Health can be damaged when someone thinks that they understand the reason for a certain pain but misunderstand the nature of the problem. Even the church can be harmed when people presume to know the mind of God on a topic that hasn’t been addressed. In these, and countless other instances, the simple phrase “I don’t know” can put a halt to what might otherwise be a disastrous next step. That simple phrase allows us to get clarification, seek more information, or at least make people aware that there are some things that we may never know, which will hopefully then allow people to reach more accurate and healthier conclusions about how to proceed with our lives.
Peace and blessings – Pastor Aaron