On Playing God and Letting Go

“Stop trying to play God”, he said, his green eyes flashing with emotion. “You want to know the when, but that’s not in your control. You aren’t God”.

It was another cold January day (is it just me, or does January seem to last forever?), and I had succumbed to the anxiety that gripped my stomach every morning. I wanted to know how long we would feel stuck in the limbo, I wanted to know what our exit strategy was, and I wanted to know it NOW. My husband held me by the shoulders, staring into my eyes and seeing something there, something that no one else sees. And that’s when he told me to stop trying to be God.

It is so hard to not know, to not have the answers, to not know how long this feeling of being trapped will last. But as the doors continue to close around me, as the solutions I concoct in the dead of night when I can’t sleep continue to fail, I find myself strangely at peace.

Here, in this ill-lit hallway of possibilities, with the door to teaching at Cristo Rey closed, the door to getting my teaching certificate closed, the door to teaching at St. John Neumann closed, I begin to see that perhaps it is not God’s plan for me to teach in Atlanta next year. And because these doors keep closing, I have to believe that somewhere, God is preparing to open one (or a window at least). I choose to see the doors closing and the loud thud as they shut as a sign that something better is coming, that Aslan is on the move.

I am an anxious person by nature; I like to know where I am going before I leave, I like to have my plan laid out and my goal chartered. But right now, there is no plan. There is no guarantee that I will be able to leave this job, that my husband will find something before he gets fired in May, that I will not have to go to India, that we will be able to get pregnant. It’s just this big, blank, and empty canvas. I’m afraid, but also resolute; I refuse to bow to fear, to uncertainty, to the tyranny of the unknown. Instead, I choose to embrace the discomfort of not knowing, to actually trust in God, not in my plans. I choose to lean into the feeling of being stretched like taffy, knowing that God bends but does not break, that my Father who loves me is capable of bringing the good out of everything.

So while part of me, the scared and anxious Sofi in the back of my brain, still thinks that I should get a teaching job tomorrow, or that Dany should have his dream job at Chemonics today, the weak yet resolute Sofi at the front of my brain accepts that this is where God has us right now. I think back to the women in my life who have had the biggest impact on me, my mother and grandmothers, and recall the struggles they had to go through as well. I feel their presence, their encouragement, their accented voices telling me to keep going, to not dare give up.

And so I cling to God, to the Virgin Mary, to my husband, and to my family. While fortune favors the bold, God is near to the humble, the brokenhearted, the ones who long for release. For as long as I’m in this corridor, I will not succumb to the claustrophobia, will not plot my own escape, but will wait with watchful eyes and keen ears for a window to open. Because I know it will. Because I trust in God.