Repost of "You Don't Know What You Don't Know" from The World's Best Blog

Originally written Dec. 16, 2007.

What exactly does that mean to you? It could mean several things, but what it means to me is that until someone shows you or tells you something, or in this case until you experience or see something you don't know that it even exists. Companies spend billions of $$ to convince you that there are problems that need solved that you don't know about, but they can solve them for you, and sometimes they may be right. Sometimes we go along in life thinking that we have or know all that is available to know about a specific thing. An example would be if you drive to work every day a certain way and you "know" that it is the most efficient way to get there or you are just satisfied with that route, then one day a friend at work tells you about another way and you try it and it saves you seven miles and 12 minutes each way. You didn't know what you didn't know. What would make you really mad is if that friend had told you about that four years ago, but you were too stubborn and too sure of your own route and wouldn't even try it. Then one day your car broke down and you got a ride from your friend and he took you that way and then you discovered he was right. Based on 220 work days a year, in four years you had driven an extra 12,320 miles and wasted an extra 440 hours (over 18 days) of your time driving to and from work.

Unfortunately, my current job makes me work a lot of Sundays. When I work Sundays I usually miss church. I try to get to church when I can, but I have felt that I was okay, and I have kept my testimony. Today, I had to work, but I did get to go to part of my meeting before I had to leave. I enjoyed the meeting so much and had such a good spiritual experience that I was reminded that life goes on even when I don't get to church every week, but I'm being cheated out of those testimony building spiritual experiences. I was reminded that I don't go to church for the Lord, I go to church for me.

I could live on peanut butter and jelly and greasy burgers and fries from styrofoam plates for a long time, and sometimes even really enjoy them, but what if I was living on them and didn't even know that all I had to do was turn around and I could have been eating gourmet food from porcelain china and I simply had to choose to do that. Sometimes we live on the greasy burgers because we don't know what we don't know, and we don't know that the gourmet is available to us, or we don't even know that it exists, or we don't think that we deserve it. In one way or another, I believe, almost every person is denying themselves the gourmet meal in some areas their life, and with most of us many areas. Take some time to analyze. Where are you eating pork and beans instead of filet mignon and why. How can you change it and when will you begin?

Oh, one final thought on this: What if your friend knew about the gourmet meal all these years and never told you?