These are hard times. It feels like we are nearing the end of something.
A global pandemic, racial injustice, civil unrest, political cat fights every day on the news, . . . .
I am running out of normal words to describe 2020. What else can be said?
"Unprecedented" is what I keep saying over and over and over.
A curious thing is that in the middle of this uncertainty -- where none of us have been before -- there is still a preponderance of voices claiming mostly to have the answer. Just follow the science, just follow this conspiracy video, just get rid of Trump, just re-elect him, just get another Conservative onto the Supreme Court, just stay out of those Democratic-run cities, just take back the Senate, just stay inside, just wear a mask, just chill !
We humans aren't so great at uncertainty are we.
Ever wonder how dictators rise, they offer certainty in a time of uncertainty. We will do crazy things when we feel uncertain.
I used to think faith was about feeling certain. People with faith are those people without any doubts, right? A wise man once helped me see that faith actually feels more like uncertainty than certainty. When you feel certain about things, life is sort of a calm, progression of logical steps. Things are just obvious and you don't have any real strong feeling. Faith is much more wild than that. Faith is deciding you are going to go with something even though you have very little external proof in its efficacy. The feeling that accompanies faith then is queasier than I had thought. When you are uncertain about something, but you decide anyway, and take one step in that direction., then, just after you take that step you get a little knot in your stomach, but you take another step, and you feel the knot again, that's what faith feels like.
Certainty in 2020 is an illusion. How can you really know how things are going to turn out? How can you know precisely how to respond to a pandemic this world has never seen before? How can you know how the racial tensions will play out? Will violence cross your path? Certainty, my friend, is not something anyone has right now, so why are we buying it? If someone tries to sell you a mini-van that can fly to Mars, you wouldn't buy it. You may want it to work, but you don't buy it because humans have not figured that trip out yet.
So next time someone tries to sell you the snake oil of certainty in the middle of 2020, just walk the other direction into uncertainty, and you just might find what you really need in times like this -- faith.
