“i don’t know.”

My oldest is in fifth grade this year, which means I have the great pleasure of doing her faith-grade math homework with her each night. 

I hope you caught the sarcasm in that. 

I’ve never liked numbers; I’ve always been a girl who likes words. Math has never come easily for me, and as of right now, it looks like Stella is following in my footsteps. 

Each night, we sit together at our kitchen table, the two of us hunched over her math homework. Decimals, fractions, conversions, exponents—I barely remember how to do any of it, and it certainly doesn’t help that schools are teaching math differently now, right? 

The other night, Stella was so frustrated with homework and herself. She was so mad that she didn’t already know how to do the equations even though she’d just learned the new concepts that day.

“Well, Stella, if you already knew how to do fifth-grade math, you’d be in sixth grade, wouldn’t you?” I tried to get her to laugh, to get her to see that it’s okay to be a beginner, but she wasn’t buying it.

Then I said something along the lines of, “Honey, the smartest people in this world are the ones who know how to say, ‘I don’t know.’ Because they’re the ones who ask for help and search for answers. They’re the ones who learn.” 

Those words weren’t meant just for my daughter—they were meant for me as well. 

I may hate math homework, but I’m so grateful for those sacred opportunities where my daughter and I can learn together. What a gift it is to sit with her at our old kitchen table, surrounded by confusing worksheets and word problems and eraser shavings from starting over so many times.  

There is so much power in the words “I don’t know.” And it’s a power I don’t access nearly enough. We all want to look like we know what we’re doing all the time; we all want to be experts the moment we start something new. I’ve fallen into this trap more times than I can count. Not only is it unrealistic to assume we should know everything about everything, but it also completely removes the learning process, which is one of the greatest triumphs of God’s plan for us. 

He sent us here to not know. He sent us here to learn how to trust in what we can’t see, in the things we have no evidence for. He asks us to operate on belief and to get comfortable with the unknown because it is in that space where we grow the most. 

Buddhist Zen master Shunryo Suzuki once said, “In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.” 

Our God is asking us to stay beginners. To celebrate the fact that there is always going to be something we don’t know. As someone whose brain struggles with uncertainty, this is a hard concept for me to swallow. But the moment I stop fighting against it and choose to live a life of deliberate faith, the more peace I feel.

I pray to a God who knows. I trust in a God who knows. I worship a God who is both the beginning and the end. 

I may not know everything—but I believe in a God who does.