Embracing Uncertainty Series

In his book In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day, Mark Batterson writes about a vacation he took with his family to Orlando, Florida:

One morning they were sitting at a stoplight in their rental van. The light turned green, and the car in front of us didn't go, so Mark decided to give them a little "love tap" on the horn. But when he hit the horn, it got jammed, and he couldn't turn it off. “The poor people in front of us!” he thought. “They must have thought I was a raging lunatic!”

So he quickly pulled into a gas station while everybody stared at them. They were mortified, but fortunately the horn stopped honking when Mark turned the van off. So he started the van back up, and they got onto the highway. About two miles down the road, the horn started honking again without Mark even touching it. So they were driving down the highway at seventy miles per hour blaring their horn at everybody and their brother. Mark said, “I'm not sure what people were thinking, but it felt like we were screaming at people. Get out of my lane, sucker! This road belongs to us!”

Mark didn't know what to do. “Malfunctioning horns weren't covered in my driver's ed class,” he said. So he did what he does whenever anything is broken: he hit it. He just kept pounding the horn, and it would actually stop honking for a few seconds. Then it would sporadically start honking again.

Mark said, “That fifteen-minute ride would rank as one of the most chaotic driving experiences of my adult life. But you know what? We're still laughing about it… In fact, I don't think my kids will ever forget the now infamous ‘honking horn’ incident.”

Most of their trip was preplanned. They planned on swimming. They planned on catching lizards. They planned on visiting the Magic Kingdom. “And all of these planned activities were a blast, Mark says. “But the highlight of the trip was totally unplanned.” You can't plan a horn malfunction, but that horn malfunction caused his family as much laughter as the rest of the trip combined.

Mark comments: “Some of the best things in life are totally unplanned and unscripted.”

For example, he says, “The greatest movies have the highest levels of uncertainty. Whether the uncertainty is romantic or dramatic, scripts with the highest level of uncertainty make the best movies. In the same vein… high levels of uncertainty make the best lives.” And that’s what faith is all about. It is “embracing the uncertainties of life” (Mark Batterson, In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day, Multnomah, 2006, pp. 88-89; www.PreachingToday.com).

The question is, “How?” In these uncertain times, when you’re healthy one day and fighting for your life the next, when you’re financially stable one day and struggling to pay the bills the next, when you’re madly in love one day and your lover breaks your heart the next… In these uncertain times, how do you embrace the uncertainty? How do you welcome the unpredictable? How do you accept life as it comes? Well, if you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to Ecclesiastes 6, Ecclesiastes 6, where the Bible addresses the unpredictability of life.

Ecclesiastes 6:1-2 There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, and it lies heavy on mankind: a man to whom God gives wealth, possessions, and honor, so that he lacks nothing of all that he desires, yet God does not give him power to enjoy them, but a stranger enjoys them. This is vanity; it is a grievous evil (ESV).

It’s sad when a man has everything he could want or need but fails to enjoy his God-given bounty. In fact, Solomon calls it a “grievous evil,” literally, an “evil sickness.”

Ecclesiastes 6:3-6 If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not satisfied with life’s good things, and he also has no burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he. For it comes in vanity and goes in darkness, and in darkness its name is covered. Moreover, it has not seen the sun or known anything, yet it finds rest rather than he. Even though he should live a thousand years twice over, yet enjoy no good—do not all go to the one place? (ESV)

That is, do not all end up in the grave?

The stillborn child is better off than the unsatisfied rich man, who has 100 children and never dies (“i.e., he has no burial, vs.3). Even if he lives 2,000 years, twice as long as Methuselah (vs.6), yet hates his life, the stillborn child is better off, because the stillborn child at least finds rest. That is, the stillborn child experiences freedom from toil, anxiety, and misery. The stillborn child is better off than the unsatisfied rich man, who is also no better off than the fool.