Ear­lier today I was lis­ten­ing to the News­boys on Spo­tify and an ad ban­ner popped up:

When I saw this I real­ized how alone and iso­lated we all truly feel. Per­haps that’s why social media is so ram­pant; in an attempt to feel inti­macy we’ve become hyper-connected. The prob­lem is that our social cir­cles have become very wide, but very, very shal­low. It’s almost as if the ad is telling me that now it’s no longer good enough to just lis­ten to music alone, now I also need to know what my friends are lis­ten­ing to. Strange, right?

If you don’t believe me or think I’m read­ing too much into a sim­ple mar­ket­ing gim­mick, take a moment to think about the per­son who knows you best. Per­haps it’s a par­ent or a sib­ling or a spouse. How well do they really know you? For exam­ple, my beau­ti­ful wife prob­a­bly knows about 5% of who I really am. She’s known me just over 5 years, so almost a 1/5 of my life. We were sep­a­rated 1.5 years of that due to deploy­ments. We don’t spend every wak­ing hour together, and even when we are together I don’t tell her every sin­gle thing that I think about. She doesn’t know  what hap­pened every sin­gle day of my life before I met her and she only knows a small por­tion of the days we do spend together.

So how well does my wife truly know me? And how well do I truly know my wife? And how well does that per­son truly know you? How fully and truly do we know any­one? Proverbs 14:10 affirms this when it says “The heart knows its own bit­ter­ness and no stranger shares its joy.” The Hebrew word for heart doesn’t just mean your emo­tional cen­ter or some­thing like that; the heart is the total essence of you as a per­son. The heart is the self that you know and, even deeper, the self that you don’t even know. The heart is who you truly and wholly are and it knows its own bit­ter­ness and no one can fully share its joy. Feel­ing alone yet?

And yet I find great com­fort in this thought. I don’t try to com­pen­sate by telling my wife every­thing in hopes that she’ll under­stand me. Nor do I con­stantly ask my wife what she’s think­ing so I can know her. Why? Because I rest in the firm knowl­edge that God does know me. Tim Keller, in The Wounded Spirit, said that “if you don’t have an inti­mate, per­sonal rela­tion­ship with God, you are utterly alone in the world.” And he’s right!

The com­fort­ing truth is that God knows me bet­ter than I know my self. Read Psalm 139 and you’ll quickly see what I mean. In verse 1, David says “O LORD, you have searched me and known me!” The word for search here means some­thing like “spy; probe; search; exam­ine; explore; sound out; see through; be explored; investigate.” God hasn’t just searched you out and found you, He’s also searched you within and knows you com­pletely. God knows us to a degree that is impos­si­ble for us to know one another or even our­selves. The descrip­tion continues:

“you dis­cern my thoughts from afar.

3You search out my path and my lying down

and are acquainted with all my ways.

4Even before a word is on my tongue,

behold, O LORD, you know it alto­gether.“

(Psalm 139:2b-4)

God knows our thoughts before we have them because He knows the minds that pro­duce them. God knows all our ways far bet­ter than even we do. In fact, God knows us so well that He knows what we’re going to say before we do. David paints this won­der­ful pic­ture of God being with us from the moment we fall asleep to the moment we wake up (I awake, and I am still with you. Psalm 139:18b).

Wikipedia defines lone­li­ness as “an unpleas­ant feel­ing in which a per­son expe­ri­ences a strong sense of empti­ness and soli­tude result­ing from inad­e­quate lev­els of social rela­tion­ships.” Our great com­fort is that we’re never truly alone. In fact, we’re never, ever alone. Not if we know God. The Per­son who knows us bet­ter than we know our­selves is with us always; He will never leave us nor for­sake us. May you be com­forted by the knowl­edge that God does know you and He is always with you.