I just don't get it

Questions. Life is full of them.

Some are easy, superficial. The answers don't matter all that much. What sandwich I buy, what's on TV, whether it rains today - none of these are weighty matters.

Others are hard. They take time and insight and courage to work through.

How can we tackle climate change? What's going on with my perfectionism? Why did my marriage fail?

And some... some feel like the question itself is somehow out of reach. Even asking barely makes sense, we struggle to find the words to express the jumble in our hearts. The answer - if there is one - is so far beyond us, we can only hope to catch glimpses of it. In this life, at least.

Our brains are finite, and God is not. Therefore God himself and the universe he made are full of truths that our brains just can't handle.

We know this. It's logical, it makes sense, it must be true. And yet, often, these out-of-reach mysteries are the very questions that we feel we most need an answer for.

One of my foster kids has helped me enormously with this. 16-year-old Holly had a brain that wasn't wired the same as most people's. And nowhere was this more apparent than when it came to maths...

It was a Monday evening, around half seven. The dinner plates were cleared, her drying up as perfunctory as ever, and now she was sitting at the kitchen table, face screwed up, gripping the pencil with her strange fist-grip, all but ripping a hope through the paper as she pressed with all her might. If sheer physical tension could do arithmetic, she'd have been finished ages ago. Sadly that's not how it works. She looked across at the example we'd done together, then back at her half-finished sum. You could hear the cogs clicking. Very, very slowly.

"What do you need to do next?" I probed, gently, trying to make sure she didn't grind to a complete halt.

"I don't know!" she wailed, looking at me with those big helpless eyes. It was a gesture she had mastered, and in school, it worked every time. Someone came over and 'helped' - which, with a bit of encouragement from Holly, meant they did it for her.

Not so at home - it was her bad luck that I have years of teaching under my belt and big eyes don't work on me. "Well, I can go through it with you if you like?" I offered, and she scowled. "Or you can leave it. You don't have to work it out if you don't want to. Why don't you think of something else to do this evening instead?" She scowled again. Holly was only allowed to watch two hours of youtube each day, and she knew I wouldn't let her turn the TV on until she had worked out how much time she had left. She sighed and bent back over the example, and I quietly put my finger on the next line she needed to do, and a few minutes later she had managed it. Just as she did around this time every evening.

She leapt up, enormous grin on her face. "I've got one hour left!" she beamed. I pointed at the number of minutes. "Oooh, and seventeen minutes!" She set her watch alarm and scuttled off to fill her mind with teenage makeup routines and disconnected clips from twenty different soaps and adults in strange onesies who shouted everything while staring directly into the camera, just in case the audience dared to look away.

Holly had done this calculation many, many times. Her special needs school didn't set homework and so I'd found a few opportunities to get her to engage with basic maths and english tasks as part of her normal life. (Once again - the downside of ending up with an ex-teacher for a foster carer.) Counting her money when she wanted to go to the shop. Weighing cooking ingredients and reading recipes. Once she'd decided that doing sums to impress the neighbours' kids was a fun game and sat for over an hour, with a somewhat bemused 8-year-old Jessie, doing basic arithmetic. The thing was, she never got any better at it. However many times she went through the steps, she still needed the example, still worked through it line by line, not noticing anything was wrong if she made a mistake. Her brain wiring had a great big glitch when it came to numbers. Sure, she could count, but she didn't actually understand them. In her head, the size of a number made no sense - she had no idea if two numbers were twice as big as each other, or a thousand times. And anything with a decimal point in it - time in hours and minutes, money in pounds and pence, ages in years and months, height in metres and centimetres - that was a total mystery.

She just didn't get it. It made no sense to her.

When we went into a shop, if she had £1 to spend she could understand that something costing £1.25 was out of reach. But she had no idea whether she could buy one or two or ten items that each cost 79p.

When she looked at the clock, if bedtime was 9:45 and it was now 7:30 she knew she didn't have to go to bed yet. But she had no idea whether she had one hour or three remaining in her day.

When she talked about people's ages, she could understand who was older and who was younger. But she had no idea how old they'd be when she turned 18.

She just didn't get it.

And watching her struggle with Maths was something I found strangely reassuring. Because, as I said at the start, I'm deeply aware that my brain also has limitations. And glitches.

Some of humanity's abiding struggles happen where our brain-glitches are exposed.

How does a God who is all powerful and always good allow such depths of human suffering?

How can my salvation depend on the response I make to Jesus' invitation to follow him - and yet also be the result of God choosing me?

If God knows all things, and all my days are already written in his book, how does prayer make any difference?

A key element in all these questions is time. And time is one of the things that human brains can't handle. We all have a brain glitch.

There are some things we do know. We live in time. God lives outside time. Outside time is the truest reality - eternity is really real, in a way that this life now isn't. All that we experience now, and that includes time itself, will one day be rolled up like a garment and all that is temporary will be burned away, discarded, shrugged off - as we see things as they really are, as we see ourselves as we really are, as we see him as he really is.

We know that's true. But we don't get it. We're just like Holly with maths - there is a reality out there that we know exists - we know it can be accessed - but for us, it's a complete mystery.

And that mystery doesn't just throw up philosophical questions - the ones that keep students up into the early hours but the rest of us just shrug and move on. Our brain-glitch over time underlies some of the practical questions that shape our everyday lives.

How do I cope with the hard things that go on and on, my prayers unanswered?

Why am I so fired up for God on Sunday but by Tuesday it feels so distant?

How can I achieve anything when all my desperate efforts to catch up leave me falling further behind?

How do I cope with getting older?

Why am I so fickle - bounding with joy one moment and plunged into despair just a couple of hours later?

What do I do with the mounding disappointments of a life that just isn't quite as I'd imagined it would be?

I think we can learn from Holly again.

She didn't stand much chance of developing an understanding of numbers. And we don't stand much chance of developing an understanding of time. Sure, we can think about it, and bits and pieces may fall into place - but fundamentally - we're stuck with the brain glitch we've got.

What Holly could do was learn techniques. She could have an example calculation ready to use as a template. She could practise, and get someone to check for mistakes. And so can we.

Here are a few hint sheets I'm working on.

1. Ebb and flow

As C S Lewis explains, we need to remember we're animals and not machines. Just like all of nature, our lives come in cycles and are lived in flux. Physically, mentally, emotionally, we oscillate. Nothing is fixed. And our spiritual lives are the same. So we can stop worrying, or castigating ourselves, for the downs, and we can quietly put down our pride at the ups. Instead, noticing those cycles, seeing what tends to trigger them, allows us to care better for ourselves - just as we would for a plant, a pet or a loved one. And when I'm in a storm, or feeling despair or loneliness or futility crashing over me, I can repeat to self: this, too, will pass.

2. Receive the gift

I can't make a single second. Sure, I can manage the time I've got more or less efficiently - but 'managing' and 'efficiency' aren't particularly biblical words and I am increasingly convinced this isn't a very wise approach. Time is a gift. And gifts are meant to be received, delighted at, marvelled at, enjoyed. So instead of cramming as much into the day as I can, leaving me frazzled and rushing and permanently late, I can learn - slowly, with slip-ups, aware of my need to practise - to receive the day, and to be grateful; to see this moment right now as a present, and breathe slowly, and be glad.

3. Plan in pencil

Planning isn't wrong in itself. But notice that most of the important plans in the Bible are given by God (Noah's Ark, Moses' tabernacle, David's temple); and reflect on how often the people involved have no clue what God is actually doing (Joseph being sold into slavery, the Israelites being chased to the Red Sea, the disciples at any point you care to mention). The man who plans to build bigger barns to hold all his crops so he can live out his luxury retirement is called a fool. The Tower of Babel didn't turn out to be such a good idea... Plans can be more about us than about wisdom, more about pride and control. If I am going to be open to what God has for me today, my planning needs to be sketched, not inked. I need to be interruptible, and when I have no idea what the interruption was for, I need to trust the God who has a plan of all my days written in his book.

4. The momentary now

Another C S Lewis insight. We are so easily drawn into living in the past or the future. The past is certain, at least; and we can linger endlessly gazing back at rose-tinted moments of happiness or replaying horrifying moments of shame. Or we can become obsessed with the future - charged with the hope of building a business, a family, a revolutionary society; or struggling under the grip of anxiety, forecasting trouble, playing out scenarios we may never actually face. The thing all these options have in common is that God is not there. God is eternally present - his name is I AM; to him all moments are now; and for us to be with him, we have to be here, in what is now, where he is. Of course we can pray about the past or the future - but we pray now, here, in the present. It is here that we can listen and obey; here that we can abide and persevere and cast our cares and be held.

5. Tomorrow's worry

Jesus spends a great big chunk of the Sermon on the Mount talking about worry. It's funny, we think of the Sermon has being amazing moral instruction - and it is - but at the end of Matthew 6, the tone is much more pastoral, as he turns his attention to our propensity to worry. Don't do it, he says. Firstly because your Father knows what you need and will provide. Secondly because our worry is futile and achieves nothing. Thirdly because worrying distracts us in running around after daily trivia, so we neglect what is really important - seeking the Kingdom. And then at the end he concludes, don't worry about tomorrow. Each day has enough trouble of its own. And he's right. We can learn to put down the unnecessary, futile, distracting future-focused stress. Today is the gift for today, and there is enough right here to be getting stuck into.

6. Snuggle in

It's tremendously liberating to accept when you don't know, can't know, and don't need to know. David has a wonderful image of this in Psalm 131. He - the king! - recognises that he doesn't need to concern himself with things that are beyond him - that to do so would betray a proud heart and haughty eyes. Instead, he has calmed and quietened himself and is content, like a weaned child with its mother. He may be the king, but he's not the King. In the arms of the Lord of the universe - who is also his Daddy - he can rest. Israel, he concludes, put your hope in the LORD - now and forevermore. If our hope is in our Daddy's competency, care, provision, love, grace, sovereign plan and timing, then we can do the same. Snuggle in. Daddy's got this. It's OK that I don't.

There are some wonderful images of time in the Bible. From the perspective of heaven, we humans, with all our activity and plans and rushing around, are just smoke. Or vapour, grass, or wildflowers. The wind blows over our place, and we are gone. Those images might sound bleak or dismissive unless we remember that this vapour is of such significance to God that he counts every hair on our heads, stores all our tears in his bottle, and died on a Roman cross to bring us home. No, we're not dismissed. We're honoured beyond all comprehension. It's like looking up at the night sky and seeing our smallness against the magnificence of the Milky Way; smallness that is nevertheless declared to be the best part of all creation. We are dust - but dust with the breath of God in us. Breathe easy. No-one expects dust to understand much. Put down the superman (or superwoman) cape.

And one day, this dust will understand. One day, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. I have a hunch that we won't care much about most of our questions then; there will be realms of glorious truth open to us that right now we can't even begin to contemplate, and we'll have forever to explore it and proclaim it and rejoice in it.

For now, live in this moment, this gift, and be glad.