No, We Don’t Know What’s Going to Happen – and That’s a Gift

GROWING UP WITH ‘PROPHETS’

Growing up, I watched my evangelical community make prolific predictions of a dystopian future. We had it all mapped out. What we envisioned was a bleak hellscape, ruled by a villainous cabal, where dissenters are mercilessly hunted and a litany of divine plagues fall upon humankind. All this was maybe three to five years away at best.

Imaginative, sure, but on target? Let’s consider our prophetic hit rate with these questions:

Do you wake each morning preparing to cope with 40-pound hailstones, infectious sores and rivers of blood? Do you spend your days scouring a desolate land for scant food and resources? Do you purchase those goods using a UPC code tattooed to your right hand or forehead, showing your undying allegiance to Supreme Leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the High Prophet Bill Clinton? Have the world’s evangelical Christians been vacuumed into the sky to drink virgin mojitos with Jesus by heaven’s poolside bar?

I’m presuming the answer to all these questions is no. So, as far as our prophetic utterances went, points for creativity but not for accuracy. And here’s the important thing: apart from the very few who parlayed these ‘prophecies’ into fortune and notoriety through TV talk shows and volume after volume of third-rate fiction, these fanciful predictions of the future have done few people any real good.

AN UNWRITTEN FUTURE

Now, with another Donald Trump presidency set to commence, other people and groups are mapping out a dystopian future of doom and despair. In it, Trump and his acolytes attain a kind of godlike power over all aspects of society, and systematically lay waste to everyone who’s not a white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, Republican male. Even now, we’re told, influential figures are pulling the pieces of their shadowy master plan into place.

Yet there’s a problem with this narrative, and all such narratives, and it’s a simple one: humans can’t predict the future.

Look, I get it. Donald Trump isn’t an honorable or a moral man. I don’t consider him fit for any kind of office. Nor is the world a safer place with him in power. He happily stokes the fires of prejudice and seeks retribution against his personal and political enemies. Will he act in spiteful, even dangerous, ways? Or will others feel empowered to perpetrate such acts in his name? I’d say the chances are good. Am I in any way optimistic about Trump’s presidency? By no means.

The world on any given day, though, has countless moving parts: the plethora of individual decisions people make, the shifting sands of our thoughts and emotions, the changes in the very organs and cells within our bodies, the phenomena and movements of the natural world, growth, construction, development, deterioration, destruction, death. Moreover, the interplay of these moving parts showcases a complexity beyond measure.

So, in short, we don’t ever get to know what will happen. We only know what does happen, and only when it happens.

HOW SHOULD WE RESPOND?

Most importantly, what good does all our doomsday prognosticating do us? Ask anyone who grew up with that crippling ‘End Times’ anxiety, monitoring the arcane details of geopolitical shifts for ‘signs’, hoping that when Jesus swung down into the clouds, we’d look busy or godly enough, or that we’d prayed or believed the right way so as not to be ‘left behind’. We’ll tell you, our predictions didn’t do us much good. In fact, no good whatsoever.

Instead, accepting an unwritten future is a gift. It allows us to set aside fears that may never eventuate in favor of a choice of how to live each day, a choice of how to respond to what actually happens, rather than guessing wildly about what might happen.

With that in mind, and as Trump’s second administration beings, how should we live? Here are a few thoughts:

Celebrate beauty

The universe and all it contains is much grander and greater than Trump’s small and temporary fiefdom. And beautiful things can be found everywhere – in nature, in words, in music, sure, but even in the most mundane circumstances, events and actions. Celebrating these things therefore puts life in perspective, and it brings much-needed hope in the face of trouble.

As a person with Christian faith, I believe we live and move and have our being in God, that all beauty is God’s beauty. I consider it something of an act of faith to acknowledge beautiful things. But it doesn’t have to be: my atheist and agnostic friends have no less an eye for beauty than I have. More often than not, they highlight beauty and wonder in places of which I’m totally oblivious.

do good where we can

I would prefer doing seemingly insignificant acts of goodness for the community, the environment and the people around me to having a seat in the halls of power. To care for the natural world, to treat others with dignity, to give generously, to support and assist the marginalized in the face of cruelty at the highest level – these are their own statements of defiance. These are lights against darkness.

Again, I take seriously Jesus’ call to love our neighbors, though I often fail in that pursuit. Even without sharing that faith, though, doing good in your community is simply being a good human. And it’s good humans we need right now.

ACCEPT YOUR HUMANITY

A good human is still a human. It’s vital in this moment that we don’t respond to hatred with hatred, that we don’t answer vitriol with vitriol, that we don’t dehumanize those who would dehumanize others.

But we’ll miss the mark sometimes. We’ll say a few things we’d like to have back. No doubt times will arise when we’ll feel discouraged and exhausted and bitter. That’s human, and it’s okay to be human. We can try again.

EMBRACE YOUR RESILIENCE

In the end, we are resilient creatures. We regularly surmount or outlast what we think we can’t. And one prediction will prove true: Trump will not last forever. His reign will end, as all reigns end. Despite his best efforts, even he’s not immortal.

He will be gone, and good will persist. He will be gone, and the sun will rise. He will be gone, and you will remain.

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It strikes me that these are the ways I would want to live regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. No amount of forecasting or fortune telling would alter it. And I’m good with that.