Quotes About Uncertainty

Forecasting is not a respectable human activity and not worthwhile beyond the shortest of periods.

Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.

When we reach the point where things simply make no sense, when our thinking about God and life no longer line up, when any sense of certainty is gone, and when we can find no reason to trust God but we still do, well that is what trust looks like at its brightest – when all else is dark.

Doubt is what being cornered by our thinking looks like. Doubt happens when needing to be certain has run its course.

When we think of "strong" faith as something that should be free of uncertainty or crises, I believe we have gotten wrong an important part of who God is and how the Christian life really works.

I didn't know how to "do" faith without making sure my thoughts about God were lined up, and so, once those thoughts failed to be compelling, my faith sank.

I believe that the Bible does not model a faith that depends on certainty for the simple fact that the Bible does not provide that kind of certainty. Rather, in all its messy diversity, the Bible models trust in God that does not rest on whether we are able to be clear and certain about what to believe.

this quest for certainty is running on fumes.

But doubt is not the enemy of faith, a solely destructive force that rips us away from God, a dark cloud that blocks the bright warm sun of faith. Doubt is only the enemy of faith when we equate faith with certainty in our thinking.

Doubt can certainly leave us empty and frightened, but that is precisely the benefit of doubt: it exposes the folly that strong faith means you need to "know what you believe," that the more faith you "have," the more certain you are.

Trust does not cancel our mind but circumscribes it and tames it—and so we do not succumb to fretting or anxious thoughts of being unsure.

Doubt tears down the castle walls we have built, with the false security and permanence they give, and forces us outside to walk a lonely, trying, yet cleansing road. In those times, it definitely feels like God is against us, far away, or absent altogether. But what if the darkness is actually a moment of God's presence that seems like absence, a gift of God

To mention just a few: Brian McLaren, The Last Word and After That; Valerie Tarico, Trusting Doubt; Greg Boyd, Benefit of the Doubt; Rachel Held Evans, Faith Unravelled (formerly, Evolving in Monkeytown); Philip Yancey, Disappointment with God; Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith.

The way forward is to let go of that need to find the answers we crave and decide to continue along a path of faith anyway (as Qohelet would say). That kind of faith is not a crutch, but radical trust.

no one lives in the scripted places of the Bible all the time, where God shows up as planned, tells us exactly what we need to do, and things work out

A faith that rests on knowing, where you have to "know what you believe" in order to have faith, is disaster upon disaster waiting to happen. It values too highly our mental abilities. All it takes to ruin that kind of faith is a better argument. And there's always a better argument out there somewhere.

Doubt signals that this process of dying and rising is underway. Though God feels far away, at that moment God may be closer than we realize—especially if "know what you believe" is how we're used to thinking of our faith.

that trust means letting go of the need to know, of the need to be certain. And a long and honored Christian practice, diverse as it is, already existed that understood that process.

I find it strangely comforting that walking the path of Christian faith means being confronted moment by moment with what is counterintuitive and ultimately beyond my comprehension to understand or articulate. In an unexpected way, God becomes more real to me, not less.

I've learned to be fine with not knowing.

Since we live in an age of innovation, a practical education must prepare a man for work that does not yet exist and cannot yet be clearly defined.

Only people with one short life want to go tearing out into the great unknown with nothing more than a flashlight and a stick to poke the rattlers with.

That's a huge gamble." "We're long past the time for careful certainty.

That was the trouble with freethinkers, they had overactive imaginations that made them uncertain.