When you look into a crystal ball, what do you see? Do you see your future? David Bowie singing “Magic Dance” with creepy puppets in Labyrinth? Harry Potter’s divination class? Perhaps a vision of all your hopes and dreams coming to fruition? In high school, our academic advisors seemed to expect us to look into the crystal ball and see the future laid out in front of us. Pick a career and work backwards from there. Instead, what we actually saw — the reflection of a high-schooler who didn’t even know what they were having for dinner that night.

The “five-year plan” used to be a frequent topic of conversation for college applications, job interviews, and even family holidays. It was important that you had an idea of what you wanted in life, where you were headed and how to get there. Choose your Emerald City and find the right yellow brick road to get there, never straying from all your plans and carefully carved out checklists. #lifegoals

But if the pandemic has taught us anything, we’ve realize that things don’t always go according to plan (if ever). Kids miss five days of school after the nurse sends them home with a fever, plans get abandoned because a friend came in contact with someone who tested positive, or family gatherings get postponed and then eventually moved to the magical land of Zoom. Life has shifted from planning months in advance to taking things day-by-day — because who knows what will happen tomorrow?

Today, however, discussions of a “five-year plan” have all but disappeared. With the rise of remote, work-from-home jobs, more people are moving to different parts of the country or even the world for that matter. Whatever plan they had for the future is exchanged for the spontaneity and freedom of working from the English countryside or mere steps from the Louvre. The desire for meaningful work, the search for a different career path, or the crushing weight of burnout have helped lead to the Great Resignation — sparking an era that is no longer concerned with following the step-by-step path we were told we needed in high school career readiness classes. We used to hold tight to the idea that life was a game of chess, all about strategizing your first five moves in advance. Now, this game of life feels more like a roll of the dice, a game of chance that can’t be controlled no matter how much we want to get that double.

Blaming the pandemic for our current malaise might be en vogue, but, as Rainesford Stauffer wrote a year ago, the trend has been a long time coming: 

Especially over the past few decades, planning long-term has come to feel like a fantasy in and of itself: There’s always a new crisis (typically an old crisis that’s just gone entirely unfixed) that throws people into social and economic upheaval. “Planning ahead” is the thing we’re supposed to be doing, ignoring how long people have just been trying to get by. […] Five year plans were once an indicator of certainty, a linear cohesive ladder.

It seems that the only certain thing today is our uncertainty. And that uncertainty stirs up fear and anxiety within us. Most of the time, when something good is happening in life, we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop and remind us that the future is scary and obscure. Will I have this job a year from now? Will my child get into a good college? Will I meet someone before I’m 30? It would be nice if life were on a linear, consistent, and upward trajectory. It would be nice if everything we had planned out would come to pass.

But perhaps this uncertainty isn’t only a cause of restlessness and dread. Maybe uncertainty can be a word of grace, a word of hope – permission to take each day as it comes, instead of waiting in anticipation for the next best thing or even the next big crisis. “Each day has enough trouble of its own” — so why worry about tomorrow? I’ve never been good at living one day at a time. Oftentimes my brain is rooted in the past, along with its mishaps and failures. Or other times I find myself lurching for the future, trying to compensate for or solve things that haven’t even happened yet.

If the future is uncertain, if my five-year plan is bound to change with this ever-evolving thing that we call life, then the only thing left to do is be open to it. There is a peace and hope that exists regardless of circumstances and in spite of ourselves. The kind that can’t be earned with plans or checklists. In place of anxiety, there is trust in the pure benevolence of God, a mercy and love that comes from outside of ourselves and sets us free.

And that freedom says we don’t have to look into a crystal ball to discover the path of our lives, because the future isn’t in our hands (or the hands of David Bowie). And since we can’t handle it, thank goodness that God can.

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