Hello friends, welcome to Manna-not-Mammon.
Today I want to begin with something Larry David once joked about.
He said English speakers are missing an entire social category because we only have one word for “you.” And anyone who grew up speaking a language with formal and informal forms of address knows exactly what he meant.
In Spanish, there is tú and usted.
In German, du and Sie.
In Farsi, toh and shomā.
Those words are not just grammar. They carry relationship. They tell us whether we are speaking with distance or closeness, caution or affection, formality or intimacy.
In Farsi, a child may even call his father or grandfather shomā as a sign of respect. That makes the Lord’s Prayer especially striking. Because in Persian, when Jesus teaches us to pray to God, the prayer does not use the distant or formal form. It says:
Ey Pedar-e mā ke dar āsmānī, nām-e toh moqaddas bād.
“Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be Your name.”
The word toh is intimate.
That is astonishing. The God of Sinai, the God before whom prophets fall on their faces, the God whose name is holy, is the same God Jesus teaches us to call Father.
Not because God has become less holy, but because in Christ, we have been brought near.
Paul says in First Corinthians:
“Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
That phrase has stayed with me: fully known.
We live in a world where people long to be seen. Seen online, seen at work, seen in our families, seen in our accomplishments, even seen in our pain. But being seen is not the same as being known.
To be seen can still leave us performing.
To be known means we are received at a deeper level.
God does not merely know information about us. He knows us. He knows the story beneath the story, the ache beneath the anger, the longing beneath the striving, and the child beneath the adult.
So today I want to reflect on language, intimacy, reverence, and the God who calls us His children.
I want to think about what it means to know fully, even as we have already been fully known.
