Dear People Who Keep Company With God,
I am coming to grips with the uncertainty of life. Not by choice, mind you, I didn’t think life would be filled with so much uncertainty. The comedian, Gilda Radner, called the uncertainty of life, “delicious ambiguity.” She said, “I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.”
I am no expert on uncertainty, but in the last few years it feels like I have had more than my share of it. I have learned a few things the hard way. I don’t like to say it, and no one is going to stand and shout amen, but waiting on the Lord is especially vital in uncertain times. There is unspoken pressure and temptation to look good and appear like you know what you are doing, but it is always a mistake to allow yourself to be driven in this manner.
Ironically, one of the greatest examples of waiting on the Lord is found in Acts Chapter One! The gospels close with Jesus telling the disciples to “go” and the Book of Acts opens with Him telling those same people to “wait.” There are times to go and there are times to wait. The key to success, whatever that looks like, is to know which one you should be doing. There may not be a Book of Acts if they had not waited first.
Another key for uncertainty is staying consistently true to the reason you exist and what you bring to the world. As much as possible let this be the litmus test for all the decisions you must make when you don’t know what to do. In other words, major on those things that are true to who you really are and your God given assignments.
Getting comfortable with mystery is necessary for staying sane in uncertain time. God’s ways are mysterious (Rom. 11:33). Uncertainty is a child of mystery. It is crazy, but it seems the more I pray for the Spirit of wisdom and revelation to increase in my life the more mysterious life becomes.
In My Utmost For His Highest, Oswald Chambers captured the Father’s heart in his Gracious Uncertainty devotion.
“Our natural inclination is to be so precise—trying always to forecast accurately what will happen next—that we look upon uncertainty as a bad thing. We think that we must reach some predetermined goal, but that is not the nature of the spiritual life. The nature of the spiritual life is that we are certain in our uncertainty. Consequently, we do not put down roots.”
(The roots Oswald is referring to is that we do not become set in our ways. The Father desires for us to be established in the present truth (2 Peter 1:12). Present truth is truth the Holy Spirit is currently emphasizing.)
“Certainty is the mark of the commonsense life—gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life. To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways, not knowing what tomorrow may bring.
This is generally expressed with a sigh of sadness, but it should be an expression of breathless expectation. We are uncertain of the next step, but we are certain of God. As soon as we abandon ourselves to God and do the task He has placed closest to us, He begins to fill our lives with surprises.”
Many Blessings, BW