It happened last month while I sat surrounded by baskets of unfolded laundry as a warm spring rain poured outside my windows. There was a book open beside me, but also the Netflix tab on my iPad, and a journal on my lap, plus half a dozen little unfinished projects littering my bedroom. It was only Tuesday, but I was completely overwhelmed by the week, and until that moment I could not figure out why. As anxiety bit at my soul, I took it out on my cuticles, producing bleeding little outward signs of the turmoil on my insides.
I looked at the family calendar hanging empty on the wall. Not only were no meals or activities written in, nothing was, including the concert I had been so geeked about when Christian bought the tickets. In our home, I’m the keeper of the plans: what we do for fun, eat for meals, and spend our money on often comes from a plan I’ve made or instigated, which is something that typically energizes me. But I had no clue how to plan, and my optimism reserves were zapped.
Those blank calendar squares plus the unfinished to-dos combined with the overwhelming sense that I-can’t-plan-for-anything-because-everything-is-uncertain felt familiar. And for once, instead of asking what the hell is wrong with me, a relization occurred: I’ve been here before.
I was, yet again, living in uncertainty. And I absolutely hate uncertainty.
It wasn’t pandemic uncertainty this time, not lost work or school closures due to high rates of illness. It was the Minneapolis Teachers Strike, which kept kids out of classrooms for most of March while educators protested for safer working conditions and better living wages.
Before I continue I need to say, our family fully supports teachers. We want them to get what they need for their students to succeed. Knowing our stance on the matter didn’t make standing on the shaking ground much easier, though.
For 21 days in March, everything felt up in the air. And here’s what I learned about myself last month: when uncertainty strikes, I put my entire life on hold.
I slip back into old routines. I stop washing my face, and start seeing how many days I can go without showering. I abandon the “nighttime devotional” timer that rings on my phone at 9:45 every night and instead, I binge trash tv shows with Lola who abandons her bedtime, all rules flying out the window. I’m tired constantly, and certainly don’t do any writing. I stop keeping up on the activities that fuel my creativity, all of this turning me into a bitter, dirty, exhausted and anxious version of myself I do not recognize.
This is what uncertainty does to me. When things are out of my control, I just…shut down.
This is my body’s go-to trauma response, a reactionary leftover from the world shutting down in 2020 when it was what we were all supposed to do for a time. Remember when we thought it would just be for a couple weeks? But now, two years later, I’m finding it hard to not default to shut-down mode whenever I’m confronted by uncertainty.
I know I’m not alone in that.
And it’s not our fault.
Humans as a whole crave control, stability, and predictability. While everyone’s threshold for how much uncertainty is tolerable varies, even the riskiest risk-takers generally like to know what’s going to happen next. We want to be able to plan, to be in the know, so we can anticipate what to expect. When we can’t count on much or when plans start changing, the anxious among us tend to spiral.
Worrying is how many of us cope with uncertainty.
But worrying is like sitting in a rocking chair, right? It feels super productive because it keeps us moving, when in reality, we’re not going anywhere. Still I find myself rocking and rocking – or, scrolling and binging, if you will – because some kind of activity feels better to my brain than worrying, and waiting, or making plans that might never come to be.
I feel helpless to make plans in the midst of uncertainty. Feeling helpless triggers a sense of hopelessness in my life, and my pattern is to press pause on the good things God calls me to do so I can have more time to FRET…which is not my fave, nor is it a fruit of the spirit, last time I checked.
So how do we healthily cope?
We need hope.
Hope, in my humble definition, is the belief that things will get better, despite all evidence to the contrary.
This is not something I’m able to muster on my own; but when I confront my thoughts, considering how God has brought me through worse days and darker nights than these, I can dig deep enough in my soul to access a bit of something that resembles hope.
Hope brings me to a place where I can say, even when the situation is bleak, I will trust God, because God cares about the details of our lives. I forget that sometimes.
I remembered God’s particular kind of care when I shared with a friend in my bible study about how, for our family, this strike looked like a minor inconvenience compared to the countless ways others have it worse. I said “it feels so trivial to be concerned with my lack of control when there are actual wars being fought in the world, and lives being lost in my own community to overdoses and diseases”.
But my friend reminded me that the details of our lives matter deeply to God, so in fact, none of it is trivial. And while I may not be living in a war-torn country or fighting for my life, this has been yet another setback in a two years-long span of living in uncertainty. It’s all valid.
And it matters to God.
He’s not only our Father, but our friend.
Jesus is the only friend who has ever loved us to death.
It’s not lost on me that I am writing this reflection during Holy Week, specifically what I call Sad Saturday, or the day in between Good Friday and Easter when the world went dark in God’s absence. Talk about living in uncertainty: those thirty-sixish hours in between His death and resurrection were some of the most uncertain in human history. Jesus was dead.
And unlike His first disciples, we who know the story go into Holy Week knowing the outcome – Jesus will rise again and make all things new. But without that big-picture vision, the first disciples must have been blindsided by uncertainty, and maybe even feeling a bit ripped off, duped into following a savior who seemingly couldn’t save Himself. Instead, Jesus was murdered before their very eyes. Perhaps they feared they’d be next. How uncertain!
And yet, they had to trust that the Son of God was who He said He was. It’s hard to fathom how impossible that must have felt.
We who follow Jesus are His disciples, too.And we are also called to trust, and access the impossible hope that can be found in even the darkest times. As Jesus demonstrated with His very life, death, and resurrection, the God of the Universe holds all our pieces together, even in uncertainty. God cares for us…even/especially when we can’t care for ourselves.
Our Creator is not exhausted by the details of our lives. And God cares about your details, too.
In God’s careful hand, there is hope.
Hope that the worst thing is not the last thing is what the resurrection is all about.
It’s like the encouragement I once offered a friend when she found out she was pregnant unexpectedly (which she included in her book No Happy Endings): “you are being held in the palm of a God-sized hand”. This has got to be true in the midst of my uncertainty, too. That’s my hope, anyway.
Will I remember, and live like it’s true?
Will you believe it for yourself, too??
And shortly thereafter I was reminded that I’m actually no stranger to uncertainty. In 2016 we were evicted when the building where we rented sold. In 2019 the same thing happened, which means we’ve had to scramble twice to find a new place and move in under 60 days. Who am I kidding? The beautiful home I’ve been renting for the past three years, with the great windows in the sun room and the french doors to my office is actually a month to month lease! I could be homeless any day now. And freelancing in a pandemic (or just being self employed in general) entails a MASSIVE amount of uncertainty that I live with every day.
THIS IS NOTHING NEW. It’s annoying how easily I forget.
Throughout every one of those uncertainties, God has sustained me, growing something entirely new in me; and the God I know is faithful to do it again.
My hope is to remember that.
In the unknown trials sure to come, I’m praying for a new outlook. Like Holy Saturday begs to question, “Where is God in this?”I want to ask God earnestly in the face of uncertainty:
“What are You up to, even in this?”
So on that night last month, in the midst of my overwhelm and in the middle of the Minneapolis teacher’s strike, I stopped chewing my fingers and took a moment in my messy room to breathe and pray.
Then I decided to take action on what little things I could control: I opened my Bible to where my family’s studying, the words of the prophets and the apostles reminding me how capable God is.
Next, I folded some – not all – of the laundry.
And after that, I went to bed.
The next day, I moved ahead on a creative project. I booked a couple meetings, made some moves. Just a few. But enough to feel the progression of things moving forward.
Overnight, the heavy rains had turned to snow. It didn’t stick, of course – spring snowfalls rarely do – but I couldn’t pass up the metaphor that God is making all things new, including this anxious part of me.
And it is a wild act of hope to keep going when nothing is certain.
Another night, not too much later, we were all at the dinner table when I surprised myself by saying with a casually confident certainty, “You know, pretty soon this whole thing will be over”.
Lola raised her eyebrows. “You think so?” She asked.
“I do.” I assured her, believing it was true, feeling my hopes rise like rays of light after the rain.
Even the smallest amount of light shines bright and clear when everything else is dark and uncertain.
That’s the beauty of hope.
It took me three weeks of teachers striking and two years of a pandemic for me to finally see the ways I put my life on hold when I’m living in uncertainty, but these sort of realizations rarely happen on my timeline. Still I’m grateful for the ability to reframe my thinking, to point my soul toward hope in the midst of uncertainty.
And just a couple mornings later, it happened: the call came in, announcing an end to the Minneapolis Teacher’s Strike…just as I was swabbing my left nostril for a Covid test.
Rinse and repeat.
If you’re still reading this, here are 5 tangible ways to take care of yourself as you trust God in the midst of uncertainty:
- Make a gratitude list. Write out everything you’re grateful for, and thank God for all of it, every faithful detail.
- BAKE SOMETHING. Truly, even the ready-to-bake dough from the biscuits section works wonders on the soul.
- Stop scrolling. Turn your phone off, if you can. Put it in another room, if you can’t!
- Take a walk to the nearest place where nature can be observed. Watch birds. Listen to the breeze.
- Go to bed as early as possible 🙂