May We Learn to Sit by Anna Berrettini
When I was in elementary school I dreaded going to sleep. Every night right before bedtime a terrible feeling of anxiety would wash over me. I was obsessed with getting an adequate amount of sleep, and if I wasn’t in bed by a specific time, I would panic. My parents tried everything to calm me down, but the more I focused on falling asleep, the more anxious I became. I hated not knowing what would happen if I didn’t sleep for a full eight hours. Would I be too tired to pay attention in class? Would I accidentally sleep in? Would I even make it through the next day? It was an exhausting cycle for both me and my parents. What they knew, however, was that the root of the issue wasn’t in my sleeping habits. It was about my inability to handle the uncertainty of the situation. I just wanted to know if I was going to be okay.
What a universal desire among human beings -- we just want to know that we are going to be okay. Unfortunately, attaining a feeling of certainty about the future became an absolute necessity for me in various aspects of life, which produced a great deal of anxiety in the event that I didn’t feel certain. What I didn’t realize until later was how this fundamental desire for certitude had a profound impact on my relationship with God. I have always believed in God and knew in my head that He cared for me, but I found the act of trusting God to be quite a different story. Take a chair, for example. I can think all day about the sturdiness of the chair and about how it can hold my weight -- I can even read books and blogs and listen to podcasts about how reliable the chair is. It’s an entirely different thing, however, to actually sit in the chair -- to actively choose to take the weight off of my own feet and give myself over to the chair. To say that I trust in the chair but then refuse to sit on it would reveal my distrust in it, my fear that maybe the chair couldn’t hold me. As it turns out, trusting in God is like this. I can believe in Him all I want, discuss His qualities and what He’s like, even talk to Him and tell Him that I trust Him. But to actually let Him carry the weight of my entire life -- well, that is a risk. It would require me to release my need for certainty in exchange for a deeper trust in God Himself.
Nevertheless, it was entirely possible to pray, read my Bible, and involve myself in ministry, all while never having to fully put my trust in God. And so I went on fighting desperately for certainty in nearly every area of my life, while experiencing debilitating anxiety when that was impossible. This somehow seemed better than surrendering my life to God because at the very least, I felt like I had control -- or rather, the illusion of it.
This way of life shifted, however, when suddenly my need for certainty landed on an entirely different topic -- God Himself. I started questioning everything about God -- who He was, if He was good, if He was even real. One small doubt became two, and then snowballed into four. Within the span of a few days, it was as if my entire faith had disintegrated before me. What was once a beautiful sand castle of theological certainty had started slipping through my fingers until nothing was left but a pile of sand. The true foundation of my life was revealed, and I felt like the foolish man in the parable Jesus tells his disciples: “The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat on that house; and it fell—and great was its fall.” (Matthew 7:27) I had become more concerned with being certain about my understanding of God than with actually trusting in Him as a person, as my Father. After an entire life of fleeing uncertainty of any kind, suddenly I was engulfed by it; it felt like I had been swallowed by a darkness too vast, too infinite for my own capabilities. The psalmist writes, “My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me all day long, “Where is your God?” (Psalm 42:3) For the first time I had no control over the one thing I needed most -- my faith itself.
But thankfully, God didn’t need me to believe in Him in order to keep existing. He wasn’t next to me pinching Himself to make sure He was still real. God is the master storyteller, the author from which all authors borrow. He had known from the very beginning how my need for certainty and control had enslaved me to a life of fear. While in this time of doubt I strived each day for an ounce of certitude that maybe my entire faith wasn’t futile, that God really did have a plan to wipe every tear and to set everything right, what I didn't realize was that this was God’s ultimate invitation for me to trust in Him. In my searching and questioning, I thought I was looking hard for the truth, but what I really wanted deep down was control. Control on who God was, on His whereabouts in my life, on how He handled evil in the world--even on my own ability to carry my faith. But God was gently calling me to let go of my desire to be certain about Him. My beliefs about Him, my perfectly composed idea of Him, my neat little box -- He had ripped through it all and whispered to me, “It’s not about how certain you feel. It’s about who I am in the midst of your uncertainty.”
God knew that for the majority of my life, my faith in Him was really faith in myself and in my own ability to understand Him. A song that has given me a way through this mess is called “Looking for A Savior” by United Pursuit:
I abandon my addiction to the certainty of life
and my need to know everything
this illusion cannot speak, it cannot walk with me at night
as I taste life’s fragility.
I am looking for a savior I can see and know and touch
one who dwells within the midst of us
May a broken God be known within the earth beneath our feet,
let our souls behold humility
let our souls behold humility.
Certainty really is an illusion, and it cannot bear the weight of life. Only the Sustainer of the universe fully knows the world and its brokenness, and He has already written the end of the story even if our perspective is veiled: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.” (1 Cor 13:12) May I finally learn, day by day, to take the weight off of my own feet and sit in the chair. May I finally learn to trust in a Savior through whom all things hold together. My weary bones cry out in relief as my Creator carries me to the day of completion.
