On uncertainty, giftedness, and trusting what you cannot yet see

Part 7 of a series on vocation, giftedness, and meaningful work. Click below for the previous essays:
Vocation Is a Conversation (Part 1)
Nothing Good is Ever Wasted (Part 2)
The Map and the Compass (Part 3)
Teaching the Pause (Part 4)
What to Do When the Room Is Empty (Part 5)
Everyone Else’s Straight Line (Part 6)

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By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

This is the last piece in this series, and I want to use it differently than the others, less to teach one more idea and more to say plainly what all of it was actually about.

Every piece so far has approached the same underlying question from a different angle. A student choosing a major worries mostly about being behind. Someone starting over in midlife faces something more urgent and more practical. A generation raised with too little practice tolerating ambiguity turns that same uncertainty into something closer to anxiety, a stalled feeling that gets mistaken for a verdict on an entire life. Whether calm company happens to be close by or absent, the uncertainty still has to be lived through somehow, hour by hour. And a feed full of other people’s arrivals adds a distortion of its own, a comparison built from an unfair sample that makes an ordinary winding path look like a personal failure.

If there is one thread holding all of it together, it is this: the discomfort of an unclear direction gets treated, almost by default, as evidence that something has gone wrong. Nearly everything in this series has tried to loosen that default a little. Uncertainty itself turns out to be raw material rather than a problem, the stuff a life actually gets built from, visible or invisible to the people around you.

I have spent enough years in classrooms, and enough years outside them, to know that very few lives make sense while they are being lived forward. The coherence usually comes later. A class taken almost at random becomes useful ten years afterward, or a job that felt like a detour turns out to have taught exactly what the next one required. Even a door closing can end up looking, in hindsight, less like an interruption and more like part of the architecture.

This is a narrower claim than it might sound, closer to an observation about timing than a promise about outcomes. Some disappointments stay disappointments. What tends to hold true, more reliably, is that a path is hardest to judge accurately from inside the middle of it.

Understanding what is happening, at best, changes the story a person tells about what the feeling means, rather than erasing the feeling itself. A winding path stops reading as a verdict and starts reading as simply what building something honest tends to look like from the inside, while it is still happening. The discomfort does the same work either way. What changes is whether a person spends that discomfort fighting the path or actually walking it.

There is another way to hold all of this, one I have saved until now. Scripture gives us a larger frame for this process in sanctification, the lifelong shaping of a person into the likeness of Christ, proceeding on a timetable entirely its own. Philippians tells us that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion, and that promise covers the years you can only see in part from where you stand. He placed the gifts in you to begin with, and He keeps using them, patiently, across every season that still looks unfinished from the inside.

A life held this way asks something different of you than gripping the plot yourself. Proverbs says a person’s heart plans the course, but the Lord establishes the steps, and there is real relief in that division of labor. You are responsible for showing up inside the part you can actually see. He is responsible for everything else, including the years that are still bewildering to you.

That shift changes the posture more than it changes the facts. A person still faces the same unclear stretch, whether that means a job still unresolved or a major still undeclared. But there is a real difference between gripping a path as though the whole plot depends on you, and walking one you have been invited into by the God who authored it from the start. The first stays exhausting by nature. The second, even on hard days, can feel closer to an adventure than an ordeal. Not because every turn will make sense, or every loss will become visibly useful, but because the promise of Romans reaches even here: God is at work in all things for the good of those who love Him.

That reframe is the real hope this series has been circling toward, small enough to hold in one hand and sturdy enough to lean on for years. The conversation between your gifts is still happening, quietly, on a schedule that answered to Him long before it answered to you. The only real job left is staying in the room long enough to hear it.

He knows what He put there.