Waiting upon the Lord: The Antidote to Uncertainty | Erin Kramer Holmes

Erin Holmes shares an antidote to uncertainty, which we all experience painfully at some point. We need to learn what "waiting upon the Lord" really means.

Introduction - 0:06
Uncertainty as a Core Human Experience - 1:24
Uncertainty Challenges Us - 3:13
A study on Waiting: Four Principles - 6:02
First Principle: We Must Actively Seek God to Find Him - 7:59
Second Principle: Waiting Includes Trying to Understand God's Plan for Us - 14:38
Third Principle: As We Wait, We Can Choose Faith and Hope - 21:16
Fourth Principle: If We Feel Lost as We Wait, We Can Find Reassurance in God's Love For Us - 25:16
In My Waiting - 30:16
This speech was given on April 4, 2017.

Read the speech here:
https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/erin-holmes/waiting-upon-lord-antidote-uncertainty/

Read more about Erin Kramer Holmes here:
https://speeches.byu.edu/speakers/erin-holmes/

Read more on overcoming adversity here:
https://speeches.byu.edu/collections/overcoming-adversity/

https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/erin-kramer-holmes_waiting-upon-lord-antidote-uncertainty/

"I am very grateful for the opportunity I have to speak with you today. I would like to begin with a scripture in Ecclesiastes 9:11:

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. [emphasis added]

I ponder this scripture each time I have a conversation with someone who didn’t get into the graduate program they applied to, doesn’t know what job to take, came home from their mission early, or has had other unexpected experiences. As I listen to their stories, my mind returns to that scripture and the reality that “time and chance happeneth to [us] all.”

Today I would like to explore this scripture with you, but I suggest that another way of talking about time and chance is to use the word uncertainty.

Though the sources of your uncertainty will likely differ from mine, I believe this scripture in Ecclesiastes speaks the truth. No one will be immune from uncertainty or from the struggle, questioning, heartache, and pain that may ­accompany it.

Uncertainty has many faces. It includes questions, doubts, ambiguity, and the discovery that persons (or things) are not quite what we expected. In essence, uncertainty is a reflection of the gap between our desire for the ideal and our experience of reality. The ideal represents how we think things ought to or should be; reality is how things actually are. Though we live our lives in the real world, our dreams and goals are often reflected in ideals. When we experience “a gap between the ideal and the real,”1 we experience uncertainty.

In some of my research I have studied this gap for women transitioning to parenthood. My colleagues and I have focused our attention on what new mothers thought their ideal work situations would be versus what their real work situations were. We defined work situations broadly, including opportunities to stay home, to combine work and family, or to combine school and family. The majority of the mothers in our sample (more than 70 percent) experienced a gap between what they believed to be ideal and what their actual work and family situation was.2 I tell you this to exemplify the claim in Ecclesiastes that “chance happeneth to them all.” - Erin Kramer Holmes

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