My brother is big time into North American Indian, native peoples, spirituality. I can’t really just compartmentalise it as “spirituality”, because it’s a way of life. He has become something of a cultural anthropologist, even though he is by trade a carpenter and building contractor. He’s also an artist of some capacity and an artisan; he makes “wood art”, crafting exquisite, monolithic doors that weigh a ton.My brother reads sign. By that I mean that he will see something happening in nature and he will conclude that it has consequence in a prophetic sort of way. The hawk appears in the sky, circles, and then leaves by another direction. This means something. The wind shifts. This means something. He also believes that he can change natural processes by calling upon what has commonly become known as “The Great Spirit”. He calls this spirit, “Grandfather”. He has told me the story of walking down to the water’s edge at Lake Tahoe, at the border between California and Nevada, and calling Grandfather to change the weather pattern so as to benefit a gathering of the people.To me, this is prayer and no different than what the philosophers did when they made a statue to the honour of the Unknown God and prayed to it. What one calls Grandfather another calls an Unknown God, and still others might call Yahweh, Abba Father, or Jesus. This is also what people do, calling on something greater than themselves who they believe can alter the course of their lives. People in recovery, according to the 12 steps, call this Being a “higher power”.Having turned my life over to God many years ago, I also read sign. I try to understand what God is doing in my life and through me in this world, in the lives of other people God providentially brings into my life.So, I am confused. I won’t go into the details, but it is sufficient to say that I thought I could see what God was doing with our lives, my wife’s and mine together. I was sure, with even the kind of hindsight that one occasionally enjoys, that I could see why certain events and factors had lined up and gone down just as they had; they had been leading to a destination that I believed I could see, given that I was “reading sign”. I am confused because things did not turn out like I thought they would, and it’s left me disoriented. I am bewildered, and I find myself saying, “Wow, God. How did I get so out of step with You? I have no vision now for the future. I feel a bit lost.”When that happens I know enough to stop still and wait, but the waiting had also been part of the previous process of reading sign, so it’s not as much comfort as it could have been. Waiting is difficult, but if you think you’re handling the process the way God wants, then you trust that you’ve turned your life over to the direction of your higher power and eventually HE will take control and bring about the good result. What if waiting only results in more confusion? “Where are you now, God? I know you are there, so is this a game you’re playing with me?” And that is when one stops reading sign and really feels fed up with reading sign at all.Right now I have little capacity for what is called a “prophetic ministry”. These are people who read sign in the name of God. Am I angry with God? No, because I am right there with Peter, who said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life. We have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God.” I am just fed up with reading sign in the name of God, having told myself that I believed I could see what God was doing, and it shaped up to look thus and so. I’ve done it to myself, but it still leaves me fed up with the process of reading sign.The truth is I am stuck. I KNOW that God is, and I believe the words of life that have been handed down to me in the Bible, but that doesn’t make living in this world a slam-dunk. I am not one of those who sanguinely claim all we have to do is learn the precepts and principles in the Bible and do what the Bible says, and then everything will be rosy. No. Not when the Bible itself describes how faithful men and women suffered for believing in God. Not when I can imagine how difficult the life of faith, the life of turning oneself over to The Higher Power, to Grandfather, really is. This life we all live is a complex and difficult thing, and there are no Christian formulas that make it easy. Nor are there any that guarantee prosperity or good health. You just cannot justify such by turning to the Bible unless you ignore various parts of it. And then, when it comes to reading sign and trying to see what God is doing experientially, well, to me, you’re no better off than anybody else. One person sees the current events and sees a time of judgment; another person reads such sign and sees a time of blessing.I’m just confused.Do these kinds of things seem confusing to you as well? I think it’s par for the course. One of my favourite books is ‘The Myth of Certainty’, by Daniel Taylor. If we had certainty, in reading the Bible or in reading sign, we would not need faith. For some reason, faith, believing and trusting God, is a crucial dynamic in one’s relationship with God. I know that faith is a crucial element psychologically for any given person to navigate his or her world, to trust that circumstances will work out to be supportive. So, I suspect that for faith to thrive there must be confusion, the lack of certainty, the relative successes in reading sign or applying principles from the Bible, and so on and so forth. And if God is in the process of growing us up, stretching our faith, then there will be times when this kind of confusion is intense, times in which, in spite of not being able to validate one’s reading of sign, one keeps oriented toward God, because one knows deep down inside that there is nowhere else to go. God has the words of life. And what a life it is.