The Thing That Hasn't
Happened Yet

Fear has an advantage over faith. It knows how to make a case. Give it five minutes and it can produce witnesses, evidence, and a fairly convincing description of everything about to go wrong — the man who failed, the business that closed, the marriage that ended, the diagnosis that came back badly. Faith has considerably less paperwork. It simply asks us to accept that things may turn out differently.

That is harder than it sounds.

There is an old thought that both faith and fear require us to believe in something we cannot see, and that the difference is only which one we choose. It sounds fine printed under a picture, until there is actually something to be afraid of. Then the choice isn't nearly so simple.

Fear has a legitimate place in a human life. A man standing on thin ice ought to be afraid. A woman who smells smoke in the middle of the night should not sit in bed practicing positive thinking. Fear is one of the old mechanisms that kept human beings alive long enough for us to be here — it tells us when to duck, when to run, and when the odds deserve another look. A person without fear isn't necessarily brave. He may simply be foolish.

The trouble begins when fear stops warning us about what is and starts governing us according to what might be, when a useful alarm becomes an unreliable narrator. Most of what we worry about hasn't happened yet. The test result hasn't arrived. The job hasn't failed. The person we love hasn't left. Tomorrow hasn't even shown up, and somehow we've already decided what it will bring. We can become remarkably certain about things that do not exist.

There's a peculiar arrogance in that, though we rarely think of it that way. We call it worry, or being realistic, or preparing for the worst. Sometimes that's exactly what it is. There are storms worth preparing for, bank balances worth checking, doctors worth listening to. If the fuel gauge says empty, faith is not a substitute for a gas station. But there are also times when we are simply pretending we can see around a corner.

Faith can't see around it either. Faith is not knowing everything will be all right. Nobody gets that promise. Bad things happen to good people. Businesses fail despite years of work. People we love die. Prayers don't always receive the answers we wanted. Anyone who has lived very long knows that believing in a good outcome does not purchase one. That's where some of the easy talk about faith loses me — it can make faith sound like a bargain struck with the future: believe hard enough today and tomorrow will reward you. Life doesn't seem to work that way.

Perhaps faith is something more modest than certainty — refusing to surrender today to something that might happen tomorrow. That can mean making the telephone call you've been avoiding, walking into the doctor's office, beginning something without knowing whether you can finish it. Not because you know what happens next. You don't. That's the whole point.

There's a lot of life between certainty and surrender, and most of us live almost all of it there. We make plans with incomplete information, trust people who could disappoint us, raise children knowing we can't follow them down every road. If we required certainty before taking the next step, most of us would never get very far.

Yet fear has a way of disguising itself as certainty. It doesn't usually whisper, something bad could happen — that would be reasonable, we could deal with it. Instead it says, this is going to happen, and starts filling in the details. A late telephone call becomes bad news before we answer it. A meeting with the boss becomes a firing before we walk through the door. A medical test becomes a diagnosis before the laboratory has finished its work. The mind can cover a remarkable amount of ground while the body sits perfectly still, and by the time reality arrives, we may have already lived through several versions of it.

We spend an astonishing amount of our lives negotiating with a future that has made no promises to us, giving away perfectly good hours worrying about bad ones that may never arrive. If they do arrive, all that worrying seldom leaves us better prepared. It has only charged us in advance.

One imagined disaster invites another, and before long a single uncertainty becomes a chain of them. By midnight we can travel ten years into a future built almost entirely from things that haven't happened. Anyone who has lain awake at three in the morning knows how convincing that country can become.

Morning has a way of making some of it look different. Not always — sometimes morning brings exactly the trouble we feared, the telephone rings, the answer comes back, and a problem that existed only in our imagination yesterday becomes real today. Then we deal with what is real. Real trouble deserves our attention. Imagined trouble shouldn't automatically get the same authority.

What fear doesn't spend much time considering is that the unseen works both ways. If we're going to admit tomorrow contains things we cannot know, we have to admit all of them, not only the worst ones. There may be help we don't know is coming, an answer not yet visible from where we stand, someone about to walk into our life whom we haven't met. We may discover that something we were certain would crush us can, in fact, be carried. None of that has happened either. We don't know which version of tomorrow is waiting.

That doesn't mean we should wander through life expecting everything to work out. It means we should be careful about letting fear claim knowledge it doesn't possess. The choice isn't always between being afraid and being faithful. Fear may come whether we invite it or not, and there are nights when no amount of reason sends it home. The choice comes after, in how much authority we hand it.

Every worthwhile thing in life eventually asks us to step into some portion of darkness. Marriage does. Parenthood does. Leaving home does. Loving somebody certainly does. Nobody gets the map first.

Maybe that's why courage has never required the absence of fear. If there were nothing to fear, courage wouldn't be necessary — it matters because the outcome remains uncertain. Faith lives somewhere near there too. Not the loud kind, not the kind that promises an easy road or insists everything happens exactly as we'd choose. The quieter kind — the one that looks at an uncertain road, admits it can't see very far ahead, and walks anyway.

Neither fear nor faith can tell us what's waiting around the corner. Fear just convinces us never to turn it.

Faith takes the next step anyway.