Jay,
I have been thinking about the angst you are experiencing and hope that some understanding of the process of God might encourage you.
Now that you are studying the Greek at your school, it will be fruitful to use some of the things you are learning.
There are several words in Greek for the English word ‘know’. Oida is to perceive or know intellectually. As an example, I know you because I have an email from you; I have read some of your blogs, etc.
Another word is ginosko. This is an experiential knowledge; the type of knowledge that is gained by spending time with someone, having an intimate relationship with them, experiencing what they experience, "weeping with them that weep…".
Paul says, in Philippians 3, that I may know (ginosko) Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death.
God’s desire is for you to know Him. This is not the intellectual knowledge but that of the heart, the experiential knowledge, the ginosko. He wants you to experience Him. There are many Christians around you that have a “head knowledge” of God, but, they have not “experienced” Him. God’s desire is for you to experience Him. So far, this sounds good, but how? How do we experience God and the power that raised Him from the dead and why aren’t we experiencing that now?
Paul continues to tell us how, “through the fellowship of His suffering, conforming to His death”. The only way that God designed for us to know Him, to go those 12 inches from “head knowledge” to “heart knowledge” is through the things that we suffer, through conforming to His death (dying to ourselves).
The pain you are experiencing, the “growing pains” are from suffering, from God allowing you to see and experience the pain of conforming to Him. When you conform to the world, you experience the pain of separation from God, when you conform to Him; you feel the growing pains of repair and restoration.
Although He was a Son; He learned obedience from the things which He suffered. Heb 5:8
