The Noise of Certainty and the Voice of Hope

“Why demand a map for uncharted territory?” The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley

A friend of mine and I are chronic overplanners: we are constantly messaging each other about events we’ve found, questioning whether we should get tickets, then, after booking the tickets and marking our calendars, looking for a way to get out of the obligation once it arrives. We joke with each other about this yet continue to do it, as though we each possess an inability to keep our calendars as clear as we actually want them to be.

I suspect that this need to fill our days and have something on the agenda is, for me at least, deeply intertwined with my anxiety and its desire to build a future I control: to inject certainty into my life. And perhaps I, and so many like me, could be forgiven for this impulse: we live, after all, in a chaotic and unpredictable world. Everything from my sons’ breakneck speed through childhood to a friend’s recent funeral feels like a surprise, an affront to the reality I’d just gotten the hang of, and I have to disentangle myself from that reality to learn the new one.

I spend a lot of time disentangling myself from outcomes I’d counted on, and from certainty I ache for.

I didn’t connect my need to control outcomes with an ache for certainty until I was old enough to accept that I control nothing. So … yesterday, basically. Or maybe around the time I had kids. In everything from their temporary ailments to overarching diagnoses, they have repeatedly been the entry point for uncertainty into my life, their very existence beckoning me to live into the questions (many of which are asked by them, constantly), to embrace mystery. To say “I don’t know” and mean it, then to sit in that discomfort instead of angling to fill that space with distractions, tickets, or other noise. This, by the way, is an ongoing struggle.

But I’m all too familiar with what a life looks like when it won’t admit the limits of itself. In my life, my perceived certainty has functioned as a substitute for hope and blocked me from the vulnerability that hope requires. This vulnerability, so easily construed as weakness, is what softens my relationships and makes space for the faith that Paul Tillich describes as “the opposite of certainty.” It is in this space that God’s love most clearly enters and reveals uncharted territory to be not a void, but a place where love waits. Hope’s required vulnerability is what’s missing from every movie villain (the recent iteration of Lex Luthor comes to mind), from every person you secretly don’t like. Remember Job’s friends and their insufferable yet confident way of making Job’s problems all about what he’d done, failing to recognize the hand of God?

Acknowledging that space that hope puts between what I know and what is has allowed me to stop constantly seeing myself as someone from whom things had been taken and start realizing I am someone to whom things have been given. Whether my extended singlehood, my son’s autism diagnosis, or our family’s relocation to Australia, everything I initially saw as punishment has turned out, in its own way, to be an abiding gift. Every apparent deviation from the dictates of my certainty has proven to be where God is, and where he was bringing me to join him, all along. 

Uncertainty has been shown clinically to help build trust. Beyond the psychological evidence, though, are biblical examples of God holding out on providing information to his people. I see this now not as insouciance but as an act of love: it creates space for hope. Where certainty ends, faith begins and hope enters the picture, making transcendence possible. This transcendence can often come cloaked in quotidian moments that we miss if our eyes aren’t open. It shows up biblically as an awe-inspiring lack of answers, like in Judges 13, when the angel says, “Why do you ask my name? It is beyond understanding.” It looks like the rider in Revelation 19, who “has a name written on him that no one knows but himself.” These mysteries aren’t barriers — they’re invitations. God’s refusal to be fully known is not indifference, but intimacy: a love that beckons us closer, not through certainty, but through trust. If pain is God’s megaphone, then uncertainty is where God whispers and we lean in to hear. John Swinton, writing about the unique love revealed through disability, says, “Our old certainties are unsettled and newer, deeper truths become possible.” 

Recently I learned the difference between Gothic and Baroque architecture while inside an Italian cathedral. The inside of Baroque churches is elaborate and ornate, its decor seeking to fill empty spaces and impress its audience, while Gothic churches are more elevated, drawing the viewer’s gaze heavenward. Baroque designs aim to make the viewer feel large; Gothic designs are meant instead to invoke awe, which leaves the viewer feeling small, with vast spaces between them and the structure. It’s the difference between a pontoon boat in an inlet and a sailboat on the open water. Only one contains the uncertainty of adventure.

Uncertainty isn’t the absence of God — it’s often the very place he chooses to dwell. In the fog, in the silence, in the unanswered questions — he is there, loving us not by removing the mystery, but by entering into it with us. He is our certainty: not because he explains everything, but because he loves us through everything. In the mystery, in the waiting, in the ache — he is love, everywhere.