Reframe Uncertainty (4): through the lens of God

 Reframe uncertainty through the lens of the certainty of God’s love, and interpret current events from the perspective of promise that is never revoked. What are the images of life you are holding on to that create false narratives? What is God saying that the headlines aren’t declaring? What is anxiety communicating that the Comforter is not responding to?
 
He can answer all your unknowns in a blink but he loves you by giving you a choice of response. If you are allowing uncertainty in the world to determine how useful you are to God, maybe it’s time to rethink who and what is informing your value and worth.
 
We are never too old, experienced, or responsible to need the certainty of our heavenly Father’s love. And never too old, experienced, or responsible to misinterpret silence from God during seasons of uncertainty as unloving. Silence rings as wisdom with the luxury of time and distance. Reframing uncertainty through the lens of being deeply loved and fully known changes the way we translate adversity in beginnings and what I would come to define as a tumultuous middle.
 

- Shelly Miller, Searching for Certainty: Finding God in the Disruptions of Life, 2020.

Reframe Uncertainty (3): Happy Ending with Uncertainty First

Transitioning from the familiarity of captivity to the unknowns of the desert, the exiles were unsure if God was going to make good on his promises. Are we loved or are we damned? Will the Promised Land be worth the long, arduous journey rife with uncertainty? Or will adversity and hardship divert the Israelites from the good God has planned for them? Spoiler alert: There is a happy ending. But happy endings don’t often come without navigating times of uncertainty first.
 
Uncertainty provides rescue from being stuck in the familiar ways of life that keep us from moving forward into the purposes of God. Wandering into the wilderness of the unknown is God’s divine reorientation, from what we know in the present to what God knows about the future. That’s why God chose manna to satisfy the appetite of the Israelites for forty years instead of milk shakes and cheeseburgers. “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions” (Exodus 16:4).
 

- Shelly Miller, Searching for Certainty: Finding God in the Disruptions of Life, 2020.

Reframe Uncertainty (2): Moses in the Time of Uncertainty

Not enough was the cry of the Israelites in response to the fear of uncertainty threaded throughout the Exodus story. I am not enough was Moses’ knee-jerk reaction to God’s request from a burning bush to lead the Israelites out of captivity. Not enough is ultimately our deepest fear when we encounter the wilderness of the unknown as we journey through life. Maybe right now, as you hold this book in your hands, you fear that you won’t have enough time, food, money, influence, approval, friendships, support—you fill in the blank. What is missing in your life that God is not enough for you? What situations are you attempting to solve with self-reliance instead of reliance on God?
 
Three days after God provides a miracle in parting the Red Sea, ushering the Israelites into safety, that miracle in moments of desperation becomes a faded memento forgotten once stomachs begin growling. In the desert, it was as if the whole community had amnesia when their hunger was unsatiated. “If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death” (Exodus 16:3).
 
It is scary to open one’s self to the dark of the divine, giving up control that brings an illusion of safety with it. Mystery can make you hesitant to hope, decidedly prone toward doubt, and more anxious for preferred outcomes. Who am I? Why me? Why now? Those were the first questions Moses asked when God tasked him with leading the Israelites out of slavery and into freedom. And they are the same questions that haunt us when uncertainty flares like a burning bush on the sidewalks of suburban life.
 

- Shelly Miller, Searching for Certainty: Finding God in the Disruptions of Life, 2020.

Reframe Uncertainty (1): God Watches Sinner from Different Perspectives

When a career is replaced by a bot, a church splits due to irreconcilable differences over theology, a friendship dissolves in betrayal, and livelihood is compromised by a health diagnosis, self-protection is our knee-jerk reaction. It is human nature to turn inward, self-reflect, and assess current uncertainty through the lens of our circumstances. But God requires something different from us. Look up and make eye contact with him amid the disruptions of life.
 
Exiled from his own people, perhaps Moses was looking for proof that he was worthy of love and belonging too, as he watched an Egyptian beat up a Hebrew, a man who could’ve been his distant relative. What provoked him to watch his people endure the ravages of hard labor? What question might he have been trying to answer? What false narrative had he made into truth? Moses chose murder over love. How might his actions been different had he chosen to look up rather than out?
 
Because God was watching the Hebrews too. But his response was compassion and liberation, freedom from captivity. Ironically, God chose Moses to lead his own people into freedom, a man prone toward self-reliance rather than relying on God. They watched. Both Moses and God were watching the same people from different perspectives. The Egyptians could’ve been wiped out in a breath, but God offered the choice of response first. What are you watching?
 

- Shelly Miller, Searching for Certainty: Finding God in the Disruptions of Life, 2020.

Recovering Christianity’s Answer to Human Brokenness

Social and political revolutions have shown no tendency to transform the heart of darkness that lies deep in the breast of every human being. That is evidently true. And amid a flood of techniques for self-fulfillment there is an epidemic of depression, suicide, personal emptiness, and escapism through drugs and alcohol, cultic obsession, consumerism, and sex and violence—all combined with an inability to sustain deep and enduring personal relationships.

 

So obviously the problem is a spiritual one. And so must be the cure. But if the cure is spiritual, how does modern Christianity fit into the answer? Very poorly, it seems, for Christians are among those caught up in the sorrowful epidemic just referred to. And that fact is so prominent that modern thinking has come to view the Christian faith as powerless, even somehow archaic, at the very least irrelevant.

 

Yet even though the church’s track record for solving social and individual ills may not appear historically outstanding, we believe that it holds the only answer—still. What then is keeping Christianity from being that guide to life which it alone can be? Christianity can only succeed as a guide for current humanity if it does two things.

 

First, it must take the need for human transformation as seriously as do modern revolutionary movements. The modern negative critique of Christianity arose in the first place because the church was not faithful to its own message—it failed to take human transformation seriously as a real, practical issue to be dealt with in realistic terms. Fortunately, there are today many signs that the church in all its divisions is preparing to correct this failure.

 

Second, it needs to clarify and exemplify realistic methods of human transformation. It must show how the ordinary individuals who make up the human race today can become, through the grace of Christ, a love-filled, effective, and powerful community.

 

--- Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives. 2009.

From Humiliation to New Hope

The turn from humiliation to new hope came about through two things, first through the Bible, and then though the encounter with other people. In the Scottish labour camp, together with some other astonished prisoners, I was for the first time given a Bible by a well-meaning army chaplain. Some of us would rather have had a few cigarettes. I read it without much comprehension, until I stumbled on the psalms of lament.

 

Psalm 39 held me spellbound: `I was dumb with silence, I held my peace and my sorrow was stirred' (but Luther's German is much stronger - `I have to eat up my suffering within myself')... my lifetime is as nothing in thy sight... Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry; hold not thou thy peace at my tears, for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were...' They were the words of my own heart and they called my soul to God.

 

Then I came to the story of the passion, and when I read Jesus's death cry, 'My God, why have you forsaken me?', I knew with certainty: this is someone one who understands you. I began to understand the assailed Christ because I felt that he understood me: this was the divine brother in distress, who takes the prisoners resurrection. I began to summon up the courage to live again, seized by a great hope. I was even calm when other men were `repatriated' and I was not.

 

This early fellowship with Jesus, the brother in suffering and the redeemer from guilt, has never left me since. I never `decided for Christ' as is often demanded of us, but I am sure that then and there, in the dark pit of my soul, he found me. Christ's God-forsakenness showed me where God is, where he had been with me in my life, and where he would be in the future.

--- Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life. 1997