As some of you might have noticed, I did not manage a blog post last week. Life has been a bit challenging, one might even say chaotic. Our younger son moved in with us for a short period while his wife and almost 2-year-old son moved in with her mother. None of this is due to their relationship, but it’s obviously putting a strain on everyone, as they work to reach a place where they are back living together in their own home and we seek wisdom on how to best help them. And then there are the work challenges and a variety of other questions.

And I want so much to know what’s going to happen and how it’s all going to come out right, but that’s not the life God gives us. I just started reading Dallas Willard’s Hearing God, and he makes a point that I kind of knew but hadn’t thought about so clearly. Too often when we “seek God’s will,” what we’re really doing is seeking certainty about the future. God doesn’t work that way. He is not interested in having a bunch of automata following his instructions blindly; he is interested in relationship with people he created with this amazing ability to actually be like and relate to our creator. He is also not interested in providing us a roadmap to follow from here to the end; he wants us to have to trust him and to walk closely beside him.

I’ve learned this before. I spent close two years literally not knowing what my job was going to be next week. You see, I was alternating between acting chair of my department and associate chair of my department. Those may not sound that different, but they are quite different in many ways. Which one I had depended on whether or not the actual chair was in town. When he was gone, he told us that he was coming “next week” pretty much every week. He did eventually come back, but mostly he didn’t. When he was here, there was always the possibility that he could get a phone call that would take him out of town immediately. And that phone call did happen a couple of times. I remember one Sunday evening when we were out of town and he called and told me that he was getting on a plane to leave and would let me know when he was coming back.

That was a rough two years. The uncertainty was hard, especially at first. But God taught me a couple of things. First, he reminded that he was in control and that it really didn’t matter which job I had. I could handle either job with his help. Second, he reminded me that we all actually live in uncertainty. Lots of different things could happen tomorrow and completely change my life. I was just given the “privilege” of knowing one of the things that could change.

So, you may ask, if I really learned those two things, what is my problem now? I guess I can be a slow learner at times for all my supposed intelligence. I think, in fact, that I did learn much and that I’m coping with today’s chaos better because of having learned to deal with the chaos that surrounded me six years ago. But God brings the lessons back so that we can learn them ever more deeply, so that our trust and dependence on him become all the greater.

So I look around and teach myself to say, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling.” Psalm 46:1-3. My chaos is not so literal as that described in the Psalm, but God is a refuge in all forms of chaos, the only refuge who is certain for all of our tomorrows.