“Often we want to be able to see into the future. We say ‘how will next year be for me?’ ‘Where will I be five or ten years from now?’ There are no answers to these questions. Mostly we have just enough light to see the next step: what we have to do in the coming hour or the following day.” – Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey

How many times have you prayed these words? “Dear God, please give me a clear answer.” or “Jesus, I’m begging you to just show me what I am supposed to do here.” or perhaps, “Lord, if you will make it clear that everything will work out fine, then I will do what you are asking of me.”?

I know I have prayed that way many times before and I still find myself struggling with the desire for absolute clarity. We often find ourselves in a difficult life decision, perhaps a career change, or college selection, or deciding on a graduate program, perhaps deciding to quit your job and become a writer, or go back to school late in life. Perhaps it is a question of whether or not to marry someone. We also ask this question when trying to decide how to handle a difficult situation, like conflict with a family member or other things that come up.

It is difficult to navigate God’s will for our lives. So often we find ourselves being able to see in some moment of clarity what God desires for and from us, and then just as we are ready to take the step the moment is gone and all we see is the great chasm between us and the end goal.

In retreats I’ve given on trust I’ve often likened this to standing on one end of the Grand Canyon. Suddenly we have this moment of clarity where we can zoom in and see the glory that is on the other side. The canyon is gone and the great treasure which God is calling us to is all we see. We sit in awe and wonder and excitement. We tell the world about our dream, we journal about this newfound destiny, we might even lay out a quick plan for ourselves. We go to sleep late that night because our mind won’t stop thinking about this great thing that we are going to do.

Then it happens, we wake up, and suddenly we see nothing but a canyon and the dream, the vision, the goal – where’d it go?

It is lost in the horizon.

Suddenly fear sets in, “How am I going to get across this canyon? I don’t know how to hike. I don’t have enough water for the journey across, I’m going to die in there.”

More specifically our phrases normally sound like this, “I’m too sinful to achieve that.” or “I am horrible at studying, I won’t make it through two years of grad school?” or “I have no business sense, how could I possibly achieve that?” or simple things like, “I don’t know – what if it doesn’t work out? What if I was wrong and this isn’t what I was supposed to do?” “I can’t confront this unhealthy relationship in my life, I hate confrontation… or I don’t want to be alone.”

Praying for Clarity

So what do we do? We pray for clarity, we pray that God would allow us to see the future, to know that it is all going to work out. But as Nouwen says, “There are no answers to these questions. Mostly we have just enough light to see the next step: what we have to do in the coming hour or the following day.”

Why is this?

Why won’t God just give us clarity? Why can’t we have a little more light? – The best answer I’ve ever heard to this question comes in a story about man going to meet Mother Theresa.

A scholar went to stay with Mother Theresa’s sisters at the house for the dying in Calcutta. At the beginning of his visit Mother Theresa came and spoke with him.

She asked, “and what shall I pray for you for?”

He said, “Mother, the thing I desire most in my life is clarity. To know what God desires of me and to know exactly what he wants me to do. Will you pray that I have clarity?”

To this Mother Theresa responds, “No. I will not pray for clarity.”

The man retorts, “But Mother, I look at you and you just seem to have so much clarity, you always know what you are supposed to do, you follow God as if you can see everything you are called to. I want that.”

Mother Theresa replies, “I do not have clarity, what I have is trust. I will pray that you can learn to trust God every day. He will show you what to do each step of the way.”

Praying for Trust

We pray for clarity because we want security, we want to know not just that everything will be alright, but we want to know for sure that it will all work out according to plan, generally we mean our plan. We pray for clarity because if we know exactly what is to come, then doing the hard things in the process will be worth it, then we won’t look silly if it doesn’t work out. We desire clarity because it makes us comfortable.

But God is always calling us to trust him more and more every day. In fact I truly think that the goals, dreams, aspirations, desires that we have in our lives – all of which can be very good things – are ultimately a carrot used to get us further along in the journey. That “end goal” that we see across the Grand Canyon in that brief moment of clarity about our lives, isn’t really the end at all. It is merely a stop along the way. The end, well that is lost in the horizon – the great paradise to which our souls long to go. Heaven.

When we can’t see the end, when we don’t have enough light to see further then what is right in front of us, we should not panic. We should not retreat. Rather, that is when we are called to trust, to place our desire, dream, goal, aspiration, our quest – in God’s hands.

When we ask the question “How will next year be for me?” or “Where will I be five or ten years from now?” – we need to stop and pray not for clarity – but for trust. It is in the day to day trusting in God’s will and living in the light which he has given for that day or that current circumstance, knowing that he will lead each and every step.

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