I Need To Know Where This Is Going
on the illusion of control, and why uncertainty feels more stressful than it should
🎧 Audio (12 mins) - I explored this idea in an audio format, if you’d prefer to listen.
Yesterday we all went for smoothies, and when my husband turned right out of the parking lot instead of left, I started to feel uneasy.
There was a conversation going on in the car so I didn’t say anything. Until I just couldn’t control myself anymore, and I interrupted with, “I’m sorry, where are we going?” I asked like I had just come up from underwater after holding my breath for too long. I couldn’t stand not knowing why he was going in the exact opposite direction of where I believed we should be going. The fact that he might have taken a wrong turn, or that he was going to surprise us with another stop was beyond what I could handle in the particular moment.
As I thought about this desperate need of mine to know where I was going, I started to run a spiritual assessment.
What inside of me makes me so uncomfortable with the unknown, especially when that unknown was a car taking me in a direction I am unsure of?
Ok, suspend reality with me for a minute, and travel into the stuff of fiction.
Imagine being dropped, out of nowhere, into a vehicle in a city unknown to you, going somewhere you did not know, but with someone you did. Would you sit calmly by and trust your driver knew what was going on? After all, you trust them? Or would you grab the armrest as if you were sliding down a steep hill on a slippery sled and scream, “Where are we and what are we doing?”
That’s how I feel when the person who is driving takes a “wrong turn,” like I just entered the Twilight Zone. My existential angst kicks in whenever I realize I am not in control of my own destiny because I don’t know where we are going or what we are doing.
I realize this is a bit extreme, but am I alone in this?
The Illusion of Control
Do you ever feel this same kind of anxiety driven by not knowing what your future holds?
It’s an uncomfortable realization, isn’t it? The notion that we doubt our safety unless we know our destination.
Human instinct seems to tell us that if something important is going to happen, it’s safer if we influence it. That sounds reasonable, right? After all, me doing something to protect myself increases the odds of my safety. And, because of that, my brain equates agency with security.
But apply that to the things only God can control, like timing, outcomes, or other people, and you’re in for a world of hurt. If God is truly directing events, then my control is limited.
But, truth be told, we don’t feel comfortable inside that limitation, because to limit your control is to make friends with vulnerability.
It’s far less vulnerable to say God’s providence plus my vigilance equals safety. Many an anxious Christian has proven that you can trust God’s goodness while simultaneously assuming His providence alone is not enough. It’s not a question of his existence or character, but of His wisdom.
Proverbs 3:5–6 exists to speak to just such anxiety when it says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding.” Our instinct is to lean on our own understanding because it feels more reliable. And it’s a tale as old as time. Abraham tried to fulfill God’s promise through a surrogate. Martha tried to manage the room for Jesus. Peter tried to control what Jesus would do next.
They didn’t reject God, full stop. They just struggled to live in a world where He determined the outcome of their lives. In other words, they couldn’t live in peace with unresolved uncertainty.
When the Israelites wandered the desert, worrying about their next meal or the timing of their arrival, they felt the tension. Sure, they knew God existed. I mean, He was a pillar of fire right in front of them. They could literally get a visual on Him.
But still, the question was, could His management of their lives be trusted? Just like me in the passenger seat, they were grabbing for the armrest because the Driver wasn’t taking the route they would have chosen.
So, how do you actually surrender control? How do you move from the theory of Proverbs 3:5 to the actual practice of it? By a process of retraining both your soul and nervous system through:
The Surrender Snowball
Surrender is like getting out of debt. You’ve spent years spending what you didn’t have to spend, and now you want out. If you have ever listened to Dave Ramsey, then you know you don’t get out quickly, but methodically. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, you gain momentum, one small payment at a time, starting with the smallest debts first, so the wins start to build like a snowball.
Spiritually, that means starting small, like letting someone do something in a way you wouldn’t, making a decision without weighing every possibility, or moving on without checking one more time. These surrenders feel both insignificant and negligent at the same time. Funny how that works, but that should only stand to prove how tightly safety and control are tied together.
When nothing falls apart, your nervous system starts to register what your belief alone couldn’t seem to hold onto: that the absence of your control isn’t the same as the presence of danger.
These small surrenders build a snowball of tolerance for the uncertainty that used to lead directly to anxiety. And what you end up with, over time, is a recalibrated understanding of security, one that no longer depends on your constant intervention to be sustained.
Don’t Scratch
Control is like an itch you want to scratch. It feels so urgent, so necessary, so good, but with each scratch, you are only making the problem worse, leading to more scratching, and itching, itching and scratching. It’s a vicious cycle.
To stop the itch that is control you have to pause. Instead of going right to fixing things, stop, don’t do it. Let the text sit unsent. Let the question go unasked. Let the uncertainty be what it is.
Like the skin needs space to heal without being scratched, the brain needs space to see that the catastrophe it expects isn’t actually happening.
Spiritually, this looks like leaving the unknown alone and entrusting it to God. That means that anxiety will rise, peak, and then, without intervention, start to settle, leaving your soul with the evidence it needs to realize that nothing fell apart just because you didn’t scratch the itch of control.
Let It Go
Corrie ten Boom once said, “Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts when God pries your fingers open.” The struggle is real. When you hold everything tightly, your body, your breath, the outcome, you’re practicing letting go like Pharaoh holding on until the plagues are in your living room and the Red Sea is closing over your head. That isn’t surrender; it’s just being overpowered by reality.
True trust requires a physical liturgy, literally unclenching your fists and releasing your breath to signal to your heart that you are safe. Learn from Pharaoh: let go before the crisis forces your hand, and teach your soul that the Driver can be trusted long before the road gets bumpy.
Build a History of Trust
We update our internal maps through repeated experience. After enough times watching things work out without your interference, you end up with a new way of thinking. One that says, “Things can work out even when I am not the one managing them.” Thus retraining your brain to recognize that the world can function perfectly under God’s control, even when you aren’t helping Him.
Anxiety is self-protection trying to impersonate God.
It wants to foresee, to prevent, to protect. It dresses itself in calculating outcomes and rehearsing disasters while underneath, it’s still just fear holding onto control.
But once you’ve let go of the little things, you can open your hands, and surrender more fully. You can let someone misunderstand you without rushing in to correct them. That’s freedom! You can learn to trust God even when it looks like He can’t be trusted. That’s victory! That’s a peace that surpasses all understanding.
Ever wonder what the world would do without you?
What if the chaos you’re trying to fix is actually a natural process of growth that you’ve just mislabeled as a problem? A lot of times we think things are broken just because they don’t fit our specific schedule for how they should be “fixed.”
I wonder which "broken" thing in my life might actually just be growing on a different timeline than mine?