Before we left the UK I had been thinking a lot about life and faith in times of uncertainty. We were leaving the security and familiarity of an area of London we knew and loved, a great house, a supportive church, very good local schools, and close to friends and family. To go to a city we had never been to, with no real sense of what life would be like, where we would eventually live, and what my role would be. And then throwing the children into a French-speaking African school.

I realised two things. Firstly, that life is never free from uncertainty. Although we often try to minimise the things we can’t control and spend our lives trying to reduce risk, we have far less control over our lives that we like to think. Covid-19 has taught us all that. And so, although the uncertainty and risks we were embracing by going to the DRC were fairly clear, staying in London would have in no way guaranteed a certain or risk-free existence, even before the current pandemic.

Secondly, uncertainty in life is something to be embraced. Here John Piper’s booklet, Risk is Right (free here!) has helped me enormously. Piper explores James 4:13-17. Citing James 4:14, ‘you do not even know what will happen tomorrow.’ he suggests that although most of us don’t like the fact of uncertainty, we should instead see it as woven into the fabric of our lives by God as his gift and his intention for each of us. And if uncertainty is a gift from God, then so is a significant element of risk.

Risk means taking chances with things that may and will fail. When Justin Welby went to Liverpool Cathedral he said he wanted it to be ‘a safe place to do risky things for Christ.’ This is exactly what happened as he saw the cathedral grow and flourish in surprising directions. And his parting words to his congregation were ‘If you don’t risk failure you won’t have any chance of success.’

Piper suggests that uncertainty is God’s gift to us because it allows us to do two things. The first is to learn to trust God and grow in our faith as we rely on God for the future. We learn to let go of the idea that we are in control of everything, and learn to rely on the one who is. The second is to give ourselves sacrificially to love and serve others – giving ourselves not knowing how it will be received, not calculating what we’ll get in return, risking disappointment in doing so, but in doing so learning what it means to love our neighbour.

Uncertainty has been forced upon all of us. What if we embrace it as a gift and use it to learn how to trust God and to love and serve others?

20 April 2020