09/05/2026
My diploma arrived this week.
I opened the envelope and pulled out an ordinary-looking piece of paper representing six years of my life—and, in some ways, a lifetime.
I entered Brite Divinity School in August 2020.
Abbey was beginning sixth grade.
Next week, she turns eighteen.
I keep placing those facts beside each other because they tell the story better than almost anything else can.
I raised a child while becoming a theologian.
And as I learned about parenting, formation, and God, I discovered that becoming is rarely one-way. I was raising her, certainly. But she was shaping me, too.
We were both becoming.
We still are.
During those six years, I worked full time, parented, studied late at night and early in the morning, read theology in airports and hotel rooms, preached, questioned, deconstructed some things I had been handed, and reconstructed others.
I changed my mind.
I found language for convictions I had carried for years.
I learned to listen to voices and experiences different from my own.
I became an ordained minister.
I experienced joy and grief.
Also, beginnings I never expected, and endings I would not have chosen.
And somewhere in all of that, something happened that I never expected when I enrolled in seminary: I became convinced that certainty is not the point of faith—at all.
For much of my life, I assumed that enough questions, study, Scripture, prayer, and theology would eventually lead me to solid ground.
Instead, six years of theological education gave me better questions. And somewhere in asking them, I found something more important than definitive answers.
I found God.
Not waiting for me at the answer.
There in the question.
Because if I know exactly where the path leads, if I can see around every bend, and if I have explanations for every loss and guarantees about what comes next—what exactly am I trusting? Or, better yet, who?
Faith is not certainty with religious language wrapped around it.
Faith is what becomes possible when certainty ends.
It is standing before a future I cannot see and refusing to believe that the unseen is therefore empty.
It is allowing a question to remain a question without assuming God has abandoned the conversation.
It is discovering that “I don’t know” and “I trust” can occupy the same sentence—in the same prayer.
Six years of theological education did not give me a more carefully organized God.
It dismantled my need for one!
Certainty can convince us that our understanding of God IS God. And that certainty can make us stop listening, stop wondering, and stop allowing another person’s story to change us.
Stop allowing God to change us.
So “I don’t know” may be one of faith’s most sacred confessions.
Uncertainty creates room: for wonder, humility, another person’s experience, mystery, and God to be God rather than the manageable version of God I have constructed.
Everyone is still becoming. (I have said that to the youth I minister with more times than I can count.) None of us has arrived.
Apparently that includes the person with a Master of Divinity degree.
Especially her. 🙃
In my final course, Earth & Soul, an Eco-Justice course with Dr. Tim Robinson, I walked a labyrinth.
I knew how labyrinths worked. There was a path, and my job was to follow it.
But then I stepped off the path.
My immediate instinct was a little embarrassment. I had done it wrong. I turned around and retraced my steps, hoping none of my friends and fellow ministers had noticed.
Then in an instant God showed me the labyrinth—and my life—differently.
For years, I had carried the fear that I had somehow wandered away from the life God intended for me. Maybe I had chosen a wrong path. Maybe I had missed something. Maybe a detour really was a detour.
Standing there, I asked:
What if I have misunderstood God’s faithfulness?
What if retracing my steps isn’t evidence of failure? What if the places I have labeled detours never took me outside God’s presence?
The labyrinth offered me something hopeful:
God’s presence is not limited to the moments when I think I have everything figured out. God’s grace accompanies me through uncertainty, wandering, questions, and the return.
———
Most of us are carrying an “I don’t know.”
I don’t know… what happens next.
I don’t know… whether this door will open or why that one closed.
I don’t know… whether the person I love will stay, whether my child will be okay, whether I’ll choose the “right path,” or how this story ends.
Maybe faith is learning to live inside those questions without surrendering the space to fear.
Because fear is not the *only* thing waiting for us in the unknown.
God is there, too.
That realization has changed how I understand myself.
For much of my adult life, I understood my calling through ministry: minister, follower of Jesus, mom, pastor, choir director, teacher, student. Those identities are precious to me.
But none of them is my first calling.
I was beloved.
I belonged to God.
I belonged to this Earth.
I belonged within this enormous, complicated, beautiful community of creation.
My vocation did not begin with ordination.
My belonging did not begin with accomplishment.
My identity is not secured by a ministry position, a church, a relationship, or certainty about the future.
My deepest identity rests in belonging to God. Everything else flows from there.
So tonight I look at this diploma with enormous gratitude.
And I am proud.
I am proud of the woman who began this journey in August 2020, and I wish I could sit beside her for a few minutes.
She would ask questions.
So.
Many.
Questions.
🤣
She would want dates, outcomes, and assurances. She would want to know that Abbey is okay…and how everything in life turned out at the end of her seminary journey.
And I think I would disappoint her.
Because I wouldn’t tell her.
I would take her hand and say:

Keep walking.
PAY ATTENTION.
Listen.
Let people’s stories change you.
Love people.
Tell the TRUTH.
Make room at the table.
And when the path turns away from where you were certain you were going, resist deciding too quickly that you are lost.
The labyrinth did not answer every question I carried into it. It changed the way I understood the journey itself.
There are still things I desperately wish I knew. There are chapters whose endings I cannot see. There are questions six years of divinity school did not answer.
Thank God!
The goal was never perfect navigation.
The goal was deeper trust.
And I am still becoming.
