Friday, November 07, 2014

How Do You Know What You Know?

Well, it's been more than 4 months since we moved to Texas and 3 months since I last wrote a blog post. The transition has gone well, but the transition has also consumed my writing time.

During my blog hiatus, I've been doing some thinking...about thinking.

And here's my question...

How do you know what you know?

This question might sound inane, irrelevant, or unimportant. But I believe this question is the reason for my writing hiatus. It's the reason you spend so much time trying to perfect the 144 characters in your Tweets.

Over the past 3 months, I've wanted to blog several different times. But each time I sat down to write, I was paralyzed and couldn't write. Perhaps it was my entrance into my 30s.

I have to admit I am increasingly tired of internet drama. I'm tired of creating it. I'm tired of contributing to it. I'm tired of reading it. That doesn't mean I won't be interested in creating internet drama in the days to come. It just means the last 3 months of silence have been the outcome my maturity or my controversy fatigue.

And I think it all boils down to this...I'm not sure how I know what I know.

Do you know how you know what you know?

My guess is you haven't given much thought to it. Am I right?

Over the next few posts, I want to take you on a journey to discover some reasons why you might believe what you believe.

You can call it a conversation about epistemology.
You can call it a practice in questioning yourself.
You can call it looking into your own brain.

But whatever you call it, it's the reason I stopped blogging.

And I'm back...I think.

2 comments:

Mark Maxey said...

I'm a fan of lean startup which can be applied to church planting. It defines knowledge through assumptions that have been confirmed or refuted via validated learning in context of the OODA loop.

If you ever get writers block, I'd be interested in hearing what you have really learned and how that differed from what you though you knew.

Brad and Anna said...

Good questions, heavy ones if we really are questioning. For the first 30 years of my life, I didn't really question what I knew. Why would I? Life was about doing good so that life would be easier. When it ended up getting harder the "gooder" I was, I really had to question what I knew, if anything. I pray that God is surrounding you with people who point you to Him during these questions. I had to seek them out, but they were easy to find once I started looking. I have seen similar questions lead people away from God when they didn't get the answer they wanted. Too many times we define what is real by what we want. When we don't get what we want, we tend to redefine our reality. Seeing things as they are, frees us to communicate with people who don't see things the same way. If frees us to love more, and hopefully gives us a better understanding of who God really is, not who we want him to be. Brad