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We have a strange relationship with uncertainty.
We want to understand things. Not necessarily immediately, and not always perfectly, but eventually.
We want to know why something happened, what we missed, what it meant, and what and if we were supposed to learn from it.
Understanding can feel like control.
If we can explain something, maybe we can accept it. If we can find the cause, maybe we can prevent it from happening again.
But what happens when there is no explanation that makes everything okay?
What happens when we ask every question and still end up staring at the same situation thinking, This still doesn’t make any f*cking sense.
That is where faith can become complicated.
For some people, faith begins with certainty.
For others, it begins somewhere much messier.
Sometimes it begins with anger.
I used to joke that when someone asked me why I was baptized, I’d tell them, then quickly add, “God and I aren’t on speaking terms.”
It was easier to make a joke than admit I was angry. Angry at God for things I believed He had allowed to happen. Angry that I couldn’t understand why certain things had happened. Angry that no matter how many questions I asked, no explanation ever seemed to come.
I didn’t stop believing in God. I just didn’t know what I believed about Him anymore.
And maybe that is more common than we like to admit.
We can believe in something bigger than ourselves while still being angry with it.
We can have faith and questions at the same time.
We can want to believe and still wonder how a God we are told is good could exist alongside so much pain.
For a long time, I thought those questions were a problem.
I thought I needed to solve them before I could believe.
But some questions aren’t puzzles meant for us to be able to solve. Some things happen that cannot be neatly explained.
Some losses won’t come with lessons. Some doors just close without giving us a reason.
And sometimes, the harder we try to make sense of something, the less sense it makes.
And yea, it’s exhausting. Especially for people who have learned to survive by figuring things out.
There comes a point where analyzing every detail stops helping and starts becoming another way of carrying something we were never meant to carry alone.
That realization can come quietly. Or it can come when life completely dismantles the version of ourselves we thought we knew.
There are moments when we can no longer control our circumstances. And sometimes, even more frighteningly, we can’t control ourselves.
Those are the moments when the people who love us often become part of the story in ways we never intended.
They watch us struggle.
They see the exhaustion in our faces.
They see us disappearing inside something they cannot fix.
And there is a particular kind of pain in seeing the worry in the eyes of people who love you and knowing you are hurting them without meaning to.
They want to reach you. They want to help. They want to take some of the weight.
But sometimes there is nothing anyone can say that will make the darkness disappear.
Eventually, we may reach the point where we have tried everything we know.
We have questioned.
We have analyzed.
We have rationalized.
We have tried to control what we can and understand what we cannot.
And sometimes, our way simply stops working.
That can feel like failure.
But maybe it isn’t.
Maybe sometimes reaching the end of ourselves is where we finally become open to something beyond ourselves.
I didn’t go searching for God.
God found me.
And looking back, I think He had been knocking for a little while.
Maybe I just hadn’t been listening.
It is strange how easy it is to mistake silence for absence.
We can become so focused on why something happened, who was responsible, what we missed, and what we should have done differently that we forget there may be another part of the story entirely.
I spent so much time trying to understand what God had allowed that I forgot there was another party involved.
Apparently, I had been conducting a full investigation with only half the suspects.
Eventually, the question changed.
Instead of asking, Why did this happen?
I started asking, What if I don’t need to know why yet?
And then came another question:
What am I really going to lose if I just open the door?
Faith didn’t arrive as certainty. It didn’t come with every question answered. It wasn’t a perfect moment where everything suddenly made sense.
It started much smaller than that.
It started with being willing to believe that maybe there was more happening than I could see. Maybe there was meaning I couldn’t understand yet. Maybe not having an explanation didn’t mean there wasn’t one.
And maybe trusting God didn’t require understanding God.
That changed something.
Looking backward can sometimes reveal what looking forward cannot.
The moments that once looked like isolated tragedies begin to look like parts of a much larger story.
The heartbreaks changed us. The disappointments redirected us. The people who came into our lives changed us, and so did the people who left. The lessons we never wanted to learn became part of who we are.
That doesn’t make the painful things good.
It doesn’t mean everything happened for a reason in some simplistic, comforting way.
It means that meaning can sometimes be found in what happened, even when we never understand why it happened.
Maybe that is where faith becomes less about answers and more about trust.
Trust doesn’t mean believing that nothing bad will happen. It doesn’t mean pretending everything is okay. It doesn’t mean abandoning questions or ignoring pain.
It means accepting that we may not be capable of seeing the entire picture from where we are standing.
We are walking through the story while trying to understand the story. Of course we’re going to miss things. Of course some chapters won’t make sense while we’re in them.
Maybe faith was never meant to be a map showing us every turn before we take it.
Maybe it is simply knowing enough to take the next step.
There are still things I don’t understand. There are still questions without answers. There are still moments when I look back and think, Why the hell did that have to happen?
But I no longer think unanswered means unheard.
I no longer think uncertainty means abandonment.
And I no longer believe I have to understand the entire path before I can trust where it leads.
Sometimes we spend so much of our lives trying to figure out where God is that we miss the possibility that He has been there the entire time.
Maybe He has been knocking.
Maybe the door was never locked.
Maybe we were simply too busy trying to understand everything on the other side to notice who was standing there.
Maybe we were never meant to have all the answers.
Maybe we were meant to trust the One who does.
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