Healthy Uncertainty

While flying back from Grand Rapids via Chicago (where the high was 16 in GR with snow falling sideways, then on to balmy Chicago with a high of 9) there was a jumble of thoughts running through my head regarding our certainty, or lack there of, in the nature and mien of God. These thoughts don't usually come unbidden into my head, I had been reading Revolution of Character: Discovering Christ's Pattern for Spiritual Formation by Dallas Willard with Don Simpson, which some out there would say is my problem, choices of books. Anyway, they were making the point that everyone goes through spiritual formation of some sort. We either delve deeper or we spend our lives rejecting the premise of God's promise, either way is a development of sorts.
But the real quest, is the acquisition of wisdom, or understanding. Ancient scripture tells us that "fear" is the beginning of wisdom. Fear of God and what he is capable of, what lengths he has shown he will go to accomplish his mission.
The tribe with which I am most familiar has been focused for decades on knowledge. The gathering of details, of properly applied doctrine, of carefully choosing who we will or won't associate. But we seem to have missed the real point...understanding.
Does it strike you as odd that we seem as clueless as everyone else in the face of today's challenges? Does it seem odd that we fret and moan as loudly as the "gentiles" about our money, our country, our "rights"? Shouldn't we (after all these decades of knowledge gathering/cataloging/parsing) be able to shed some light on how this will all work out?
Yet, we seem to be falling into the same mindset as our unwashed neighbors. We worry just as loudly, and can't seem to come to a point of being able to say to those around us, " don't worry, we know what God is up to." Hmmm. but do we really? Where is our knowledge now? Where is the worth in our doctrinal distinctives? All those poor, hapless souls we have crucified on the altar of theological correctness, perhaps were crucified to assuage our uncertainty.
Uncertainty creates fear, and fear creates anger, and anger creates destruction.
Maybe we need a healthy dose of spiritual uncertainty. We know we can't navigate on our own, maybe we just need to learn to listen, to others, to our uncertainess, to God.
Or maybe I need to get some other books.
Godspeed, its okay to be uncertain, its not okay to bludgeon others for their uncertainess.
Don