Do You Know About God... or Do You Know Him?

Florence Miriam Bailey, a 19th-century ornithologist, refused to study birds the way her peers did. The standard method was to shoot them from a distance and examine their dead bodies in a laboratory. Bailey saw a problem: you could learn facts about a dead bird on a table, but you could never actually know a living bird that way. So she picked up an opera glass—binoculars made for the theater—and went outside to watch birds in their natural habitat. She wrote a landmark book called Birds Through an Opera Glass, arguing that the student who goes afield with an opera glass "will not only add more to our knowledge than he who goes armed with a gun, but will gain for himself a fund of enthusiasm and a lasting store of pleasant memories."

This episode argues that many Christians approach God the same way Bailey's colleagues approached birds—from a sterile distance, in a kind of "spiritual research lab" where comfort and control replace real encounter. The central question is whether you know about God or actually know him. The answer, drawn from John 17:1–5, is that eternal life itself is defined as knowing God personally, and that kind of knowledge requires getting outside of your own control.

The Opera Glass of Faith