You Don’t Need Certainty—You Need a Shepherd

why uncertainty can feel like scarcity

🎧 AUDIO: I’ve gone into this topic further in this audio. Enjoy!

Are you comforted by your circumstances?

Let me ask it another way: are you uncomfortable because of your circumstances?

When your comfort depends on things outside your soul, like your health, relationships, money, safety, reputation, or your control over the future, comfort is perpetually just beyond your reach. Because, as Thomas Watson would say, “The world can no more fill the soul than a drop can fill a bucket.”

When your peace needs favorable circumstances, your soul is vulnerable to circumstantial disturbance. Which means you have to constantly monitor your world. You have to track, anticipate, adjust, and brace, as if you are the manager of all that was never put under your authority.

Anxiety then grows from that feeling of being responsible for things only God controls because of an unconscious sense that you don’t quite have what you need in order to be okay.

This is a hard pill to swallow, and I both hate saying it and love what saying it reveals. That the lack we often sense is not the lack we have. We don’t actually lack provision. We lack certainty. We lack predictability. We lack the ability to forecast the future.

The Christian answer to that lack is not certain provision, it’s safety. And, you don’t need certainty and savings to be safe. You need a Shepherd, and you have one.

(I talk about this more in my audio, found at the top of the page.) Let me know your thoughts. Have you ever felt like uncertainty was uncomfortable?

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.