On Uncertainty

The cause of so much anxiety

Photo by fr0ggy5 on Unsplash

Uncertainty haunts our thoughts and preoccupies our time. It drives us to extreme anxiety and desperate acts of control. It is the scourge of progress, both societal and personal. It fills us with dread and hypotheticals and is the reality of living in a world in which we are not God. Uncertainty is a primary source of much of our anxiety in life, and yet it’s a basic fact about living as creatures rather than the Creator. We cannot have certainty about the vast majority of things. The only thing I believe we can have certainty of is God’s love for us. As Cormac McCarthy writes in The Crossing, “For nothing is real save his grace.” But other than that grace, that love, we’re mostly left with confidence about things in this life. You can call it functional certainty if you like, but it’s still not certainty in the strictest sense of the term. And that’s where anxiety creeps in. The “what ifs?” of existence. How shall I pay this bill? What if my spouse doesn’t really love me? What if I harmed this person? What if I sinned? How will I finish this project on time? Uncertainty unrestrained because it grows in the imagination. Anything is possible. And when anything is possible, if you aren’t careful, everything is worth fearing.

For all of us, we must come to learn to live with this fundamental condition or be crushed by it. Either we come to accept uncertainty and the contingency of existence (from our perspective), or we fight to make ourselves little gods and writhe in pain as we fall short. So much of our anxiety in this life stems from a fundamental failure to accept uncertainty. But uncertainty can be so terrifying. Our only hope, as I see it, is that we learn to rest in our finitude. It’s a leap in the dark, an act of hope based on the character of God and the promises of Christ to work all things together for our good. Uncertainty is a core source of our anxiety in life and a precondition for our creatureliness. Coming to terms with this tension is a life long project for many of us.