Personal Blogs

Before I Knew Him, He Knew Me

I get this feeling that comes over me when I see someone standing alone at the edge of the sea, staring out as if listening for something only they can hear. Once I even saw a dog doing the same — motionless, gazing at the horizon as though it too had a private world beyond my reach.

And sometimes I explore my own thaughts . When I listen to Solveig’s Song, or the adagio in Grieg’s Piano Concerto, or the theme from Dances with Wolves, I am struck by how far my mind travels and how abruptly it stops. The music lifts me toward a place I can almost sense, yet never fully enter. My mind has walls. It hints at infinity but cannot cross into it.

These moments draw me toward larger questions — the kind that sit just beyond the reach of tidy answers. What is infinity? How can Scripture reveal Jesus as part of the Godhead and yet distinct as a person from the Father? How does the human mind hold paradox without resolving it?

There is another question beneath all these questions: What is happening in God’s world while I am living in mine?

There is a beautiful and unsettling glimpse of this in the encounter between Jesus and Nathanael. Nathanael had never met Jesus, yet when Jesus saw him approaching, He said, “Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.” Nathanael was puzzled. “How do you know me?” he asked.

Jesus answered, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.”

Whatever Nathanael had been doing beneath that fig tree, Jesus knew. Nathanael had been somewhere Jesus was not visibly present, doing something Jesus had not been told about by Philip. Yet Jesus saw him.

And that must have been an extraordinary moment for Nathanael. He thought he was simply living inside his own little world, beneath a fig tree, unseen by the man standing before him. But he discovered that his world was already fully visible to Jesus.

Nathanael did not know Jesus, but Jesus knew Nathanael.

There is something deeply moving about that. We spend our lives trying to understand God, trying to work out what He sees and what He is doing, while all the time we are the ones who are completely known. There are rooms in our minds that no other human being can enter, memories we cannot adequately explain, thoughts that come and go without words, longings whose origins we barely understand. We may not even understand ourselves. Yet none of this is hidden from God.

Maybe this is part of what it means to encounter Jesus. We imagine that we are the ones searching for Him, but then, sometimes, we discover that we have been seen all along.

All of this surfaced again this morning as I walked with God in my morning prayer and read Psalm 131:1–2. Only two verses, yet they carry enormous spiritual weight. It is one of those psalms that seems almost childlike in its simplicity, but becomes deeper the longer you sit with it. It is a psalm about quieting the soul before God.

We enter the mind of a man who lived 3000 years ago and yet, he is not different from us. David begins with humility: “My heart is not proud, LORD, my eyes are not haughty…” He doesn’t merely claim he avoids arrogant behaviour; he goes beneath behaviour to the heart. Pride, biblically, is not only thinking you are better than others. It can also be the restless conviction that you must understand everything, control everything, solve everything, or be important enough to matter. David is saying, in essence, I don’t need to be the centre of the universe. And that is profoundly liberating.

Then he adds, “I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me.” He is not rejecting thought or inquiry. Scripture encourages us to seek wisdom. But David recognises a boundary: there are things that belong to God which we cannot carry. There is a difference between seeking understanding and demanding mastery. We can exhaust ourselves trying to explain every mystery, predict every outcome, understand every person, and control every tomorrow. Psalm 131 gently says: You don’t have to.

Some mysteries are not burdens but invitations — not to anxiety, but to trust.

Then comes the heart of the psalm: “But I have calmed and quieted my soul…” David likens his soul to a weaned child with its mother. A nursing infant is restless because it wants something. A weaned child rests simply because it is near the one who loves it. That is spiritual maturity: not abandoning questions, not suppressing longing, but resting in God even when understanding has reached its limit.

At first, our relationship with God often centres on what He gives: Give me this. Fix this. Protect me. Explain this. There is nothing wrong with asking; Jesus teaches us to ask. But there is a deeper place the soul can reach: Even when I do not understand what You are doing, I can rest in who You are.

And Nathanael gives me another way of seeing this.

Nathanael was concerned with what he could see and what he knew. Jesus was standing before him, but Jesus knew something about Nathanael that Nathanael could not have known Jesus knew. There was a part of Nathanael’s world that lay beyond Nathanael’s awareness of Jesus — but it did not lie beyond Jesus’ awareness of Nathanael.

That is the difference between us and God.

We live from the inside out. We see only what our eyes, minds, memories and senses allow us to see. God sees the whole. We encounter one moment at a time; He is not confined by our sequence of moments. We wonder what lies beyond the edge of our understanding, while nothing lies beyond His.

And that is why Psalm 131 does not tell us to solve the mystery. It tells us to quiet the soul.

The psalm gives us a threefold movement: humility, stillness, hope.

First: I don’t have to be God.

Then: I can quiet my soul.

Finally: I can place my hope in God.

It echoes Jesus’ teaching about becoming like a child. Childlikeness is not childishness; it is dependence without shame. A child does not need to understand the whole world before trusting a loving parent.

That is one of the great invitations of this psalm: you may be intelligent without needing to know everything; responsible without needing to control everything; curious without being consumed by questions; confronted by mystery without losing faith. You may simply rest in God.

Nathanael thought he was beneath a fig tree, hidden from Jesus.

He was not.

And there are moments in our own lives when we feel as though we are beneath our own fig tree — alone with our thoughts, our questions, our private struggles, our half-understood hopes. Yet the Christian claim is astonishing: you are seen.

Before you understood Him, He knew you.

Before you began searching for Him, He had already seen you.

And perhaps, ultimately, that is where the soul finds its rest. Not in knowing everything about God, but in knowing that God knows everything about us — and still invites us to come near.

And then comes that final word in Psalm 131: forevermore.

God does not offer the soul a momentary hiding place. He offers Himself as its home.

Psalm 131, in miniature, whispers:

Lower your eyes. Quiet your heart. Let God be God. Rest beside Him. And hope.

A very small psalm with a very large God behind it.

The Puppet on a String: What Will We Leave Behind?

Henning Mankell had a rare gift for uncovering profound truths in the ordinary. In The Puppet on a String, he reflects on an archaeological discovery in the Czech Republic: the remains of a human being who lived some 25,000 years ago. Beside the skeleton lay something unexpected. Not a weapon. Not jewellery. Not a monument to power. Instead, archaeologists found 'a doll. A marionette. A puppet on a string.'

Mankell is deeply moved by this fragile object. To him, it is more than an artefact; it is a greeting across centuries.  A simple toy survives to whisper that the people who fashioned it laughed, imagined stories, entertained their children, and delighted in creativity. The puppet becomes a testimony that humanity has always been more than a struggle for survival. It reveals that even in the harsh world following an ice age, human beings made room for play, imagination and affection.

This is where the essay becomes profoundly existential. Mankell asks us not simply to admire the past but to confront the future. Every generation leaves something behind. The question is not whether we shall have a legacy, but what kind of legacy it will be.

His conclusion is deliberately unsettling. 'Those of us living today will not be sending puppets on a string into the future. Our legacy is nuclear waste.'

The contrast is devastating. One civilisation leaves behind evidence of its humanity. Another leaves behind evidence of its destructive power.

Whether one agrees entirely with Mankell's conclusion or not, the challenge is impossible to ignore. Modern society measures success by technological achievement, economic growth and scientific advancement. Yet the object that moves us most from prehistory is not an invention that conquered nature but a humble puppet that reminds us of the human heart. Progress has given us extraordinary abilities, yet it has not necessarily enlarged our wisdom.

Mankell's observation raises questions that lie at the heart of existential philosophy. What gives a human life significance? Is our purpose merely to consume, build and dominate, or is it found in the relationships, imagination and beauty we pass on? Long after our names have disappeared, what silent testimony will remain of the kind of people we were?

As a writer, I find these questions deeply personal.

If I were asked what I hope to leave behind, it would not be wealth or possessions. It would be words. Essays that encourage someone to think more deeply, to appreciate beauty, to wrestle honestly with truth, and perhaps to draw nearer to God. Unlike the puppet discovered beside that ancient skeleton, words leave no physical trace in the soil. Yet ideas have always possessed a strange resilience. They travel through books, conversations and memories, often outliving the buildings and empires that once appeared permanent.

There is, however, another dimension that Mankell leaves unexplored. The Christian Scriptures suggest that our greatest legacy is neither objects nor achievements but the influence our lives have upon other people. The apostle Paul spoke of believers themselves as 'letters... known and read by everyone' (2 Corinthians 3:2). Our character, our kindness and our faithfulness become a living message long before they become a written one.

The puppet on a string reminds us that people have always sought meaning beyond mere existence. The fact that a toy could survive centuries of burial and  touch modern hearts suggests that humanity possesses an enduring hunger for beauty, creativity and relationship. These are not accidental features of our species. They point to something woven into our very nature.

Mankell's final sentence is intentionally pessimistic. Yet history is not finished. Every generation still chooses what it will leave to those who follow. We may indeed leave behind polluted landscapes and dangerous technologies, but we can also leave behind compassion, wisdom, courage, truth and hope.

The ancient craftsman who carved that little puppet could never have imagined that people twenty-five thousand years later would smile at his work. In the same way, none of us knows how far the quiet influence of a thoughtful book, an act of kindness, or a life lived with integrity may travel.

That may be the deepest existential lesson of Mankell's remarkable reflection. Our lives are always speaking to the future. The only question is what they will say.

Gratitude Amidst the Stones

There are moments when the body feels like a quiet battlefield; when something unseen stirs beneath the surface and reminds you, gently but firmly, that life is fragile. Illness has a way of naming that truth. It arrived for me without ceremony, settling into three places at once, as though my own body had become a kind of Trojan horse. And yet, even there, life did not retreat.

At the beginning, there were careful words and cautious optimism. “We don’t use the word fatal,” the doctor said, and I have come to understand the wisdom in that. Life resists such final language. It continues, often stubbornly, in the face of uncertainty. Three years on, I find that the days are still full of ordinary rhythms, of quiet joys, of a gratitude that has deepened rather than diminished.

I think of this often when I walk through the Glasgow Necropolis. It rises above the city like a place set apart, where time feels both present and distant. On bright mornings, when the light softens the edges of thought, it becomes less a place of endings and more a place of perspective.

Among the stones, I find myself drawn not only to the length of lives but to their brevity. So many names belong to children, little lives scarcely begun, their years marked in small numbers that feel almost impossible to comprehend. They lived in harsher times, taken by illnesses that swept through like sudden storms. Their presence there is quiet, but it is not empty. I now understand why the Bible proverb in Ecclesiastes 7 says, “It is better to enter a house of mourning than a house of feasting.”

It is a strange grace to stand as an older man among the young who never grew old. Not guilt, but wonder rises, wonder at the sheer gift of years. Of all that has been lived: journeys taken, words written, faith questioned and found again, grief endured and softened. Life, in all its ordinary depth, reveals itself as something far more generous than we often notice.

In such a place, illness changes its shape. It no longer feels only like an ending waiting in the wings, but like a marker along the road; a reminder to look not only ahead, but also behind. However, many days remain, they are held alongside the many that have already been given. And that changes everything.

The questions that come are not neat ones. They drift through the quiet: what of those who never had time to choose, to believe, to become? And here, faith does not answer with certainty so much as with trust. The words of Christ linger: that the kingdom belongs to such as these. It is enough, perhaps, to believe that no life is misplaced, that mercy reaches further than our understanding.

Cemeteries carry a kind of equality. Every name rests the same, every story concludes in stillness. Yet for those who continue walking, there remains something extraordinary—time. Time not only as something passing, but as something full. Time to forgive, to notice, to love, to be thankful in ways that once felt unnecessary.

So, I keep walking. Not only through that city of the dead, but through each given day. Illness walks with me, yes—but so does gratitude. And so, in a quiet, steady way, does hope.