I’ve often shared thoughts about the both/and of life – joy alongside sorrow, the challenge of living in the tension of those two extremes. Yet there is another conundrum of being human, the reality of ambiguity and uncertainty.

We have noodled the difficulty, and yet necessity, of being able to experience life’s hard times and not succumb emotionally, physically, and spiritually. We’ve actually worked to embrace these challenges and grow from the hardship. We’ve even explored the joy that can come from dark days. Somehow, through trust in God, I know I am being strengthened as a result of these seemingly endless weeks of accepting the likelihood that the deceased Jane Doe brought to my attention in late August may be my daughter. I have been grieving as if this is a certainty.

Yet there is another part of the process, the not knowing. The most difficult challenge for now is the uncertainty and the anticipation that we are getting close to finding out definitively. Knowing the DNA test results should be any day now makes each day and each night fertile ground for thoughts that won’t go elsewhere.

Over these many weeks I have learned the importance of trusting in God in a way that is more intense than I could have imagined. The additional challenge of this delay and resulting uncertainty is pushing me even beyond what I knew was possible in recognizing the need for God’s intimate presence.

When a person has cancer or other serious medical condition, the wait for the diagnosis adds to the challenge. It intensifies it. Once there is a diagnosis, treatment can begin. Before that time the myriad of possibilities haunts one’s psyche.

Similarly, based on what we know already, I am 90% sure that the deceased Jane Doe is my daughter. So I have been grieving. Yet the DNA results will be the confirmation, or perhaps the information that says otherwise. There is no both/and in that determination. She is either alive or not alive. Having seen photos I am grieving as if I know. Yet do I? Not until the DNA results are known is there certainty.

The ambiguity, itself, creates a separately distinct emotional, physical, and spiritual attack, an intensity of anxiety that for now overshadows the actual resolution. It is a wrestling with a reality that seemingly has nothing upon which I will gain strength, other than in the wrestle. The cancer cannot yet be treated or found to be cured. One cannot start to process loss completely until known. I am in a torturous limbo.

Joy is obviously wonderful. Sorrow teaches us to grow from hardship and lean into God’s Presence. Ambiguity creates an absence of human ability to take action or analyze. It takes away any capacity to rely on ourselves at all. In this wrestle in order to have any peace we must give up completely and trust God in a way that can’t even be defined in terms of a benefit to ourselves other than learning how to more completely trust God, somehow, even moreso than we did before.

In the both/and, the world of opposites, we become able to see how we can grow and be better human beings. The sorrow of the loss of a loved one may remind us to cherish each day and to love others harder. Our having plenty when others are hungry may spur us to be more generous with what we have and help others. To the contrary, not knowing if a loved one is alive or dead, such an intense and overwhelming enigma, day after day, grows us day after day to give up, not who we are, but our human wiring to need to know. The fruit of this labor, for it is what it feels like, is more difficult than I could have imagined.

Only when I really surrender am I reminded through this experience that some things we are just not to know, that is, until God determines the right time. That is the point. Ambiguity is yet another (exceptionally hard) training ground.

God is a mystery, not in the sense of whether He is real, but rather, in the reality that we are allowed to know Him only as He reveals. It’s not that He’s being coy, but rather, this design builds trust. The more deliberately mysterious, the more we need to stop trying to figure it out. He will let us know what He wants us to know when He wants us to know it.  Until then we are to build our faith by trusting in Him without knowing. That’s the point, for truthfully, if I would do just that regarding this horrific ambiguity, I would be able to sleep at night.

So, as incredibly difficult as this time period continues to be for me, somehow I know that my faith is getting stronger. It has to, for there is no alternative given the reality of what I do know – God has this entire situation in His control and He will work all to the good. I know I am being strengthened through the sorrow of loss in how I have been processing the presumed death of AnnaLisa. This time of ambiguity is forcing me to relinquish myself to Him even more completely. If I am struggling it is because I still need to work on this.

These days, in general for all of us, are not black and white. In some ways they are very ambiguous. Will there be a war? Is it cancer? Is it treatable? Did I get that job? Have I done all I can? To the extent we recognize our limitations and try not to wrestle with knowing, or at least until it’s time to know or take action, the more at peace we will be.

Ambiguity is just part of life. Sometimes the alternatives are not bad ones, but rather, just unknowns. Yet when those unknowns are troubling, how blessed we are to be able to trust in our Creator and to know it will all be okay. Better yet, it will be magnificent.

Shabbat shalom.

Diane