There is something about uncertainty that has a way of bringing our deepest fears to the surface.
It doesn’t always happen when life is falling apart. Sometimes it happens when things are relatively quiet, when we have a few minutes to sit with our thoughts, and when our minds begin wandering into all the things that could happen.
We worry about our children. We worry about our grandchildren. We worry about the economy, the world around us, the direction our culture is heading, and the seemingly endless supply of things that can go wrong.
We wonder what tomorrow holds, how we’ll handle it, and whether the people we love will be okay.
And if we’re not careful, we can spend so much of our time preparing ourselves emotionally for tomorrow’s possibilities that we forget to actually live today.
I’ve had to learn a few things about that over the years.
You see, I was raised in a Christian home. My parents were deeply involved in ministry, and I spent much of my childhood surrounded by adults who loved discussing spiritual things. While I played on the floor with my toys, conversations would sometimes turn toward biblical prophecy and the end times.
Those conversations weren’t intended for my little ears. But children have a remarkable ability to absorb things, even when the adults around them don’t realize they’re listening.
I heard about world chaos, food shortages, escalating crime, oppressive governments, and the mysterious man of sin and his mark of the beast.
My little imagination went to work.
I worried about being separated from my family. I worried about war, hunger, and death. I wondered what terrible things might happen and when they would happen.
But mostly, I feared the unknown.
And I feared it with every fiber of my being.
That fear followed me into adulthood. Even as a mature believer, I discovered that some of those childhood anxieties still knew how to find their way into my thoughts. If I wasn’t careful, I could quickly find myself mentally rehearsing frightening possibilities that hadn’t happened and might never happen.
It took me a long time to recognize just how much energy I was spending trying to prepare for things I couldn’t possibly control.
And motherhood gave those fears an entirely different dimension.
As the mother of five children, I remember how often my mind wandered into the future. I wanted to protect them, prepare them, and give them every advantage I possibly could. I wanted to make sure they knew what was right, understood what was true, and had the tools to navigate a world that wasn’t always kind.
I suspect many mothers understand that feeling.
We want to spare our children unnecessary heartache. We want to make the right decisions on their behalf. We want to anticipate the dangers, recognize the warning signs, and somehow keep the difficult things of life from finding their way to their doorstep.
But somewhere along the way, loving someone can become tangled up with feeling responsible for everything that happens to them.
And those are not the same thing.
We can love someone with everything in us and still have absolutely no control over the circumstances they encounter, the decisions they make, or the roads they must travel.
That’s a difficult truth to accept, particularly when the people we love are involved.
I’ve had to remind myself of it more times than I can count.
And it brings me to a mother whose story has stayed with me for a very long time.
Her name was Jochebed.
You may remember her as the mother of Moses.
By the time Moses was born, the Hebrew people were living under the oppressive rule of Pharaoh. Their population had grown, and Pharaoh had become so threatened by their numbers that he issued a horrifying decree: every newborn Hebrew boy was to be thrown into the Nile River.
Can you imagine?
Imagine being pregnant, knowing what awaited your child if he was born a boy. Imagine giving birth and realizing that the very thing you had prayed for, protected, and loved was now in immediate danger.
Jochebed did what she could to protect her baby. She hid him for three months, but eventually, keeping him concealed was no longer possible.
So she prepared a basket, waterproofed it, placed her precious little boy inside, and set it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile.
I cannot begin to imagine the emotions that must have accompanied that decision.
Was she terrified? Did she cry? Did she pray? Did she wonder what would happen next?
Did she question whether God saw the desperation of her circumstances?
We aren’t given a transcript of her prayers or a detailed account of her thoughts. But as a mother, I can imagine the questions that might have crossed her mind.
God, what happens now? Who will protect him? Will he be safe? Will he know who he is? Will he ever know the God of his people?
And perhaps the most difficult question of all:
God, do You really have this? Because I don’t. I just don’t.
Then something extraordinary happened.
Pharaoh’s daughter discovered the baby.
Rather than allowing him to be killed, she took pity on him and decided to raise him as her own. Moses’ sister, who had been watching nearby, approached her and offered to find a Hebrew woman to nurse the child.
And that woman was Moses’ own mother.
Jochebed was given the opportunity to care for her baby during those early years, even though she knew that eventually he would return to Pharaoh’s household.
Think about that for a moment.
She was allowed to hold him, feed him, love him, and care for him. But she couldn’t keep him.
She couldn’t determine the circumstances in which he would grow up. She couldn’t choose his teachers, control his surroundings, or guarantee that he would remember the faith and heritage of his people.
She could only do what was in front of her.
And that’s where I want us to pause.
Because sometimes that’s all we can do, too.
We can teach our children. We can pray for them. We can offer wisdom, encouragement, and guidance. We can establish boundaries, make responsible decisions, and provide a loving environment.
But we cannot live their lives for them.
We cannot guarantee that they will make the choices we hope they make. We cannot remove every obstacle or protect them from every consequence. And we cannot see far enough into the future to know how every circumstance will unfold.
At some point, we have to recognize the difference between being responsible for what God has placed in our hands and trying to take responsibility for what He has not.
That’s not indifference. It’s not an excuse to stop caring or abandon our responsibilities.
It’s an acknowledgment that we are human.
And God never asked us to be anything else.
God Is Still Working When We Can’t See It
As Moses grew, he was raised in Pharaoh’s household. He experienced a life vastly different from that of the Hebrew people, who remained enslaved in Egypt.
Eventually, he would leave the palace and spend forty years in the wilderness of Midian before God called him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt.
Eighty years passed between his birth and the beginning of that calling.
Eighty years!
I wonder how many times the people who knew Moses as a baby thought about him and wondered what had become of his life.
I wonder whether Jochebed ever imagined that the little boy she placed in that basket would one day stand before Pharaoh and demand the release of God’s people.
She couldn’t have known.
She couldn’t have anticipated the burning bush, the plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, or the extraordinary role her son would play in the history of Israel.
She couldn’t see the ending.
But God wasn’t finished writing the story.
And here’s something I find particularly beautiful about that.
The circumstances surrounding Moses’ childhood didn’t prevent God’s purposes from unfolding. His upbringing in Pharaoh’s household, his eventual departure from Egypt, his years of tending sheep in Midian, and even the mistakes he made along the way became part of the larger story.
God was not limited by what Jochebed could see, what Moses understood, or what anyone else thought was possible.
And He isn’t limited by our perspective, either.
Sometimes we look at a situation and see nothing but uncertainty. We see the obstacles, the unanswered questions, the mistakes, and the possibilities that frighten us.
We look at the people we love and wonder how their stories will turn out.
We look at our own lives and question whether we’ve missed something, made the wrong turn, or somehow gotten too far away from where we were supposed to be.
But our inability to see what comes next doesn’t mean God has stopped working.
We don’t have to understand the entire story to trust the One who sees it.
The Difference Between Trusting God and Trying to Figure Him Out
I think one of the reasons we struggle so much with uncertainty is that we often mistake understanding for security.
We want to know what is going to happen because we believe that if we can anticipate it, we can prepare for it.
If we can identify every possible problem, perhaps we can prevent the worst of them.
If we can understand why something is happening, perhaps we can make peace with it.
And if we can just get a glimpse of how everything will turn out, perhaps we can finally relax.
But what happens when the answers don’t come?
What happens when the diagnosis is uncertain, the relationship remains strained, the finances are tight, or the child we’ve prayed for is making choices we don’t understand?
What happens when we’ve done everything we know to do and still cannot see a way forward?
That’s when faith becomes more than an idea we agree with. It becomes something we have to practice.
Proverbs 3:5-6 tells us:
Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths. (KJV)
Notice that the instruction isn’t to understand everything.
It’s to trust Him.
That doesn’t mean we stop thinking, planning, asking questions, or taking responsibility. It doesn’t mean we pretend difficult circumstances aren’t difficult or convince ourselves that everything will turn out exactly as we hope.
It means we stop making our peace dependent upon having answers.
We can acknowledge what we don’t know without allowing it to consume us.
We can recognize what is beyond our control without abandoning what is within our responsibility.
And we can face an uncertain future without spending every waking moment trying to control it.
That’s a very different way of living.
You Were Given Today. Let It Be Enough.
I still have moments when my mind wanders into the land of what if.
What if this happens? What if that doesn’t work out? What if someone I love makes a decision that changes everything? What if the future looks nothing like I imagined?
I’ve learned that those questions can multiply faster than I can answer them.
And I’ve also learned that I don’t have to follow every thought down the road it wants to travel.
Sometimes I need to stop, take a breath, and remind myself that tomorrow’s possibilities are not today’s responsibilities.
Jesus addressed this very thing in Matthew 6:34:
Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. (KJV)
He wasn’t suggesting that tomorrow doesn’t matter. He was reminding us not to burden today with all the troubles that might belong to tomorrow.
There is wisdom in that.
We have responsibilities today. People to love. Decisions to make. Work to do. Opportunities to recognize. Prayers to pray. And sometimes, we have difficult circumstances that require our attention and courage.
But we were never equipped to carry every possible outcome of every future circumstance.
That’s God’s territory.
So perhaps the next time we find ourselves mentally racing ahead, trying to anticipate every twist and turn, we need to ask ourselves a different question.
What has God actually placed in my hands today?
Not next month. Not next year. Not five years from now.
Today.
Is there a conversation that needs to happen? Have we been avoiding a responsibility? Is there someone who needs our encouragement? Is there a decision that requires prayer and thoughtful consideration?
Then let’s address those things.
And when we’ve done what we can, let’s allow ourselves to release what we cannot.
We may not know how the story ends.
We may not even understand the chapter we’re currently living through.
But we can choose to live this season faithfully, trusting that God’s faithfulness doesn’t depend upon our ability to see around the next corner.
Jochebed couldn’t see the ending of her son’s story. Neither could Moses during those long years of preparation.
But the story continued.
And the God who was present in the uncertainty of their lives is still present in ours.
I don’t know what tomorrow holds. And frankly, I’ve come to understand that I wasn’t created to bear the weight of knowing.
I was created to live today, to do what is mine to do, to love the people God has placed in my life, and to give honor and glory to the One whose perspective is infinitely greater than my own.
I don’t need to know how every story ends to trust the Author.
And neither do you.
Because God isn’t finished with you yet!
Until Next Time,
