When you don't know what God is doing ...

the monthly letter

Five thirty last Monday morning: even before my eyelids unstuck from themselves, pains shot through my stomach. Sometimes our bodies tell us what our minds won't. I woke into stress — I slept but apparently didn't rest.

After pouring my morning tea and Nate's coffee, I sat with Psalm 103. In verse 14, David says: "For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust."

This last phrase seemed hollow compared to all that I wanted to believe about myself at forty-seven. I own a home and feed at least five people (and sometimes more) daily. I plan meals and grocery lists, I write books, and currently I negotiate bids with contractors.

"See, I'm not dust," is what my mind tells me at five thirty in the morning when I'm confident I can make sense of the problems in my life by analyzing solutions. Somehow, I've grown up into forgetting that my frame is weak.

There's been a slight lapse in this monthly letter because as the new year turned, so did our circumstances. We learned that the walls of our beloved home were sick and silently making us sick, so we had to make a swift pivot to purge or clean the contents of our home and move our family out to initiate a massive mold remediation project.

Thus, I'm still writing in my journal from 2024, and I have no idea where my toothbrush charger or my Easter dress is. Yesterday, Char asked, "where is my Whelk shell that I found in Hilton Head?" I didn't have the heart to tell her that it is hopefully somewhere in the 125+ Sterilite bins that hold all of the remaining contents of our home, back home. I imagine there will be many needles to find in that haystack when we finally return.

So here I am, at zero dark thirty and displaced from my home (with unfolding and seemingly unending new elements of this mold remediation), reading that God knows that I'm dust and feeling slightly like the question I was asking before I read that passage — God, what are you doing here in this moment? — seems a bit tone-deaf to this truth.

But I keep asking it, thinking that if I can get my arms around what God is doing, I might not feel so foolish at my age. Somewhere along the way, I equated growth in God to be understanding how all the various elements of my life might come together for a greater goal. I've also seen my pattern of placing myself in communities of assurance; I'm not referring to the assurance of salvation, but the assurance of what God seems to be doing in a singular moment. Some entire ministries and churches profess to have an angle on precisely what God is doing. Retrospectively I wonder if we all traded in our wonder for an immature-yet-seeming mature surety of God's ways. It sure feels better to know than not know … right?

Friends, He is a mystery, and I'd like to reframe maturity as a growing down, of sorts.

David's words before the ones above were this: "As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him." But what if I don't want to be a child? It's something I don't say out loud, but I live. I don't want the foolishness of childhood or its vulnerability. I don't like the unknown of being led, versus leading. A child doesn’t know what’s happening the next day or week — they often don’t know what’s for lunch until it’s right in front of them. And what if I don't want to be underdeveloped enough to need compassion or foolish enough to need fathering?

I don't want to take the next step in front of me with a future unknown because surely you do that when you're in your 20s and not your 40s. Right? Unless you, like me, are coming to the understanding that life is about growing backward. Like Benjamin Button, I may know less this year than I did last. More wonder, more mystery, less certainty — is this actually the way of maturity?

I don't want to suggest that there isn't ever a time to ask, "What are you doing, God?" but instead that we're often asking it to find a surety that doesn't couple well with trust.

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding" (Proverbs 3:5-6) moves from being hand-lettered on my wall to the song that wells up inside of me, the one I can't not sing when I am living dark to what tomorrow might hold … again and again.

Friends, we want this trust but we often don’t get it until we (through circumstances) have no other option than to become like the little girl or boy who boards the plane with their stubby fingers wrapped around their dad’s palm, with little awareness of where and when that plane lands.

So, here is my ode to you — you, the mature adult who knows not what God's doing (or what you're doing):

Cheers to you when the path feels crooked and broken and when you're bone-tired,

…your weakness is His greatest avenue, inside of you.

Cheers to you when you've outgrown your certainty, and you have only a tiny light illuminating the one step in front of you,

…His light is most brilliant against your darkened future.

Cheers to you when your strongest days and greatest accomplishments are behind you,

…welcome to the kingdom currency of God, where the weak hold the truest strength and the blind have true sight and the uncertain blunder their way into the strong arms of God.

Maturity, for you — the ones who know not what God's doing — is demonstrated in your ability to stay suspended in mystery … in wonder.

Once a child, returning to the wisdom of a child, you've arrived. Cheers.

Yes, this grave dust beneath your knees is actually the grounds for a garden. Set aside your fate-seeking questions and pick up your trowel. It's time to dig again like a child.

Your whisper-shouting your question to God — what are you doing right now, right here? — and hearing it echo may be less a sign of His absence or your foolishness and more an invitation into the mystery of a weak frame that gets gloriously formed and held and hewn by a God who knows what He's doing … but just may not tell you.

Until next month,

Sara