God in Uncertain Times

An Ode to All We Do Not Know

This morning I thought back to one year ago.

I started the day at my desk after some Bible reading and prayer. Worked my job. Enjoyed a sense of self-determination and well-being. At 1, I left to meet a client.

By 3:30, I was in the back of a rescue, torn and bleeding with injuries that would take months to heal. Wounds that still ache after a long day of writing. An attack that continues to ripple through my life with consequences and still uncertain outcomes.

There was another morning, years back.

It was a Sunday and I worshipped with my church family—sitting behind a couple I enjoyed but only sort of knew. I thought about asking them to dinner some time.

By evening, we got word that the husband’s small plane had crashed. He had received a greater invitation—to a table awaiting all who believe, but he wouldn’t be invited to mine. That opportunity exploded on a wide, green airfield.

Life is uncertain and don’t we hate that! I know I’m not alone.

We can all think back. To the week in 2020 before we went into lockdown. To a month in early 2022 when most of us would struggle to find Ukraine on a map. To the decision that changed everything or the phone call that came in the night or the announcement that arrived out of the blue.

Why? Why? Why? When our souls long for certainty, safety, and peace does God leave us to lives where we can be blindsided?

I believe there were generations who handled this better than we do. Generations, cultures, and personalities better equipped to navigate uncertainty. People living under expansive starry skies, dependent on weather and community and favorable crops just to survive a winter—who understood their own frailty, their smallness against the universe, the fragility of existence that is like a warm breath in the cold air. People who embraced humility as the truth rather than as a spiritual exercise requiring supernatural imagination.

We are the most narcissistic generation I imagine that has ever walked the earth.

Believing we can see, predict, plan, chart, determine, and decide all our ways to eliminate risk, fear, loss, and everything we don’t want to enter our carefully mapped lives.

Perhaps because we stare at screens rather than stars and see ourselves reflected there, larger than we truly are. We live surrounded by mirrors, images, and control panels so we gauge that we have greater control than we do—mastery over our worlds and the ones we create.

So, rather than cling to God in grateful dependence, we resent Him when life breaks in and reminds us we belong to the breakable, easily obliterated human race like every generation before us. Rather than hit our knees and ask for help, we shake our fists and rebuild our towers, determined that next time the flood waters won’t reach our heights.

We are a stingy generation. A people struggling to schedule God into our days, collapsing at night with only the fleeting memory of intending to read His Word, speak His name, or exhale a prayer. We determine tomorrow will be the day but right now, we deserve a break—this drink, this workout, this episode, this update. Right now, we must be informed, of course, and rested and fed and relieved.

Stingy toward God but generous toward ourselves in ways we don’t even see because our narcissistic certainty has blinded us to the collapse of our own perspectives inward.

Jesus told a parable about us once:

“Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” But he said to him, “Man, who made me a judge or arbitrator over you?” And he said to them, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.” Luke 12:13-21 ESV

I detest the uncertainty of life and yet, I see the hidden gift of it, too. I don’t know where I’ll end up later today. Perhaps disaster will revisit my life or perhaps I’ll cook dinner and watch a show. Remembering that I wasn’t prepared last year, but God saw me through, reminds me to be rich toward God today.

Not to lay up plans and choices like a hoarded treasure I can count on to keep me warm but to lean into God, knowing He sees what’s coming and is present there as He is now.

There lies a gift in all we do not know. It strips us down to all we can know. We can know Him—and He is enough.
Become a Patron!

God in uncertain times – An Ode to All We Do Not Know https://t.co/gCULKT15O6 #amwriting #JesusChrist

— Lori Roeleveld (@lorisroeleveld) June 9, 2022