Knowing Everything?

"Dad, I'm really not into birds any more," Vince told me a few days ago.

"Really," I said.  "Why not?"

"It's just that I know everything about them -- at least for the birds in North America," he replied, very seriously.  "Now, I need to learn about wildflowers."

It is a little funny when an eight year old tells you that he knows everything there is to know about birds (or any subject for that matter).  I suppose what he means is that he has exhausted the information found in the field guide to North American birds that I gave to him a few months ago.  He certainly has studied it a lot over that time.

One of the things that growing up fixes is that feeling that we know everything. 

I think that I knew the most when I was in sixth grade.  I knew all of the state capitals, had a decent concept of history, and could do long division, fractions and even diagram sentences.  I knew there were a few gaps in my knowledge base, but I was sure that within a couple of years, even those would be resolved.

Flash forward thirty years and I have finished college, medical school, and three years of residency.  I take a lot of continuing medical education.  The one thing I am sure of at this point is that I don't have complete knowledge about any particular subject. 

That's more than OK, because it would be an awfully small world in which I could know "everything," even about a relatively small field like Birds of North America.

The reality is that this world is bigger and more intricate than human thought is capable of imagining and beneath each layer of answers is another set of questions.

Just like the God who made it.