The Question That Won't Let Go:Is it Surrender or Maturity?—A Spiritual Reckoning

By Jennifer Finch, M.A., LPC, NCC, SEP

June 3, 2025

There's something that keeps gnawing at me, something I can't quite put my finger on. It starts with a simple observation that Stephen Hawking once made: “If you believe in God's plan, do you still look both ways before crossing the street?”

At first, this seems like clever wordplay. It’s perhaps the most elegant way to illustrate the tension between faith and personal responsibility. Of course, I look both ways, I'm not an idiot. But if I put this to the Stephen Hawking test, then the question starts to work on me, like a pebble in my shoe. What exactly do I believe? And more unsettling, am I living as if I actually believe what I say I believe? Because if I truly trusted in a predetermined divine plan, would I still bother checking for oncoming traffic?

Am I brave enough to examine what I actually believe beneath these comfortable spiritual platitudes, like: It’s God’s Plan, Everything happens for a reason, God never gives you more than you can handle, Let go and let God, or This too shall pass?

These pseudo-spiritual pithy colloquialisms are often used to comfort, explain away, or justify suffering, uncertainty, or messiness. And while they might offer temporary solace, I increasingly find them hollow, or even downright maddening. Depending on who’s saying them and who’s on the receiving end, they can feel more like a dismissal than comfort. Most of us live inside this contradiction daily. And, if we look closely enough, we’re caught in an observation that cuts to the heart of this paradox. And it’s absurd.

In what religion, what theology, what spiritual logic, does God lovingly handpick a child for leukemia? And we answer with, “It’s all part of the divine plan.” Or God delivers end-stage metastatic cancer to someone who walked through the world like a hidden angel, and we respond, “You’re being tested.” Where’s the divine plan in that? Do we really believe karma will sort it all out?

And yet, even as these questions burn holes in the tidy scripts we’re handed, I catch myself praying, contemplating, meditating, and asking my guides and angels. For safety, for outcomes, for interventions, while simultaneously buckling my seatbelt, vetting the clinical trials, and reading the fine print. I’m taking every precaution I can think of, while throwing all my emotional pain into the wind—letting go and letting---well, what exactly?

I pray for healing for my loved ones while making Excel spreadsheets of treatment options. I seek divine guidance while triple-checking PubMed articles. I am researching and Googling my daily decisions thoroughly. I held on to my childhood Magic 8 Ball, and I even have a Quantum Splitter app on my phone for the really tough questions. With the push of a button (and a satisfying sci-fi sound effect), it tells me which version of reality I’m currently living in as if clarity and certainty could be crowdsourced from parallel timelines and be conjured from code.

This isn’t hypocrisy, and there’s nothing wrong with this, not entirely anyway. It’s the lived reality of being human in an uncertain and very unpredictable world. But it makes me wonder: what am I doing? What’s really happening here? Am I hedging my bets with the divine? Am I bargaining or trying to manipulate “the Star Wars’ force,” while pretending to surrender? Is this faith, fear, both?

Or maybe the question goes deeper. Maybe, I've been humanizing God, endowing this mystery human, super-power-like qualities - the ability to be petitioned, to change plans, to intervene selectively. And if that's the case, then what am I really doing when I pray? Wouldn’t he/she/it know already? Am I engaging with the infinite, or am I having a conversation with a projection of my own needs and fears?

This leads me to an even more uncomfortable place. If I'm expecting God to handle the things I'm worried about, am I unconsciously abdicating my own responsibility? Am I using faith as a way to avoid the full weight of being human—the weight of uncertainty, of having to make choices without guarantees, of being accountable for my part in whatever unfolds?

Because here's what I've noticed about life: it doesn't seem to operate on a merit system. Good people suffer terribly. Cruel people sometimes prosper. Children get sick. Cancer strikes the kind-hearted grandmother and spares the corrupt politician. Natural disasters don't check our prayer lives or our moral report cards before hitting. The rain falls on everyone, the just and unjust alike. Life is inherently unfair. If there's a plan, it's not one that promises fairness or comfort or even logic from our human perspective.

This isn’t a bug in the system—it is the system.

Accepting this doesn’t make me cynical; it makes me realistic. And sane. It's what I see when I stop trying to make reality conform to my spiritual expectations. It frees me from the exhausting “I deserve” mentality that keeps me perpetually disappointed and entitled. It gets me off the treadmill of “If I just…” If I just meditate longer, journal more gratefully, serve others more selflessly, pray harder, stay positive, forgive everyone always, and keep my chakras squeaky clean, then maybe, just maybe, I’ll be rewarded with health, happiness, financial abundance, a conflict-free marriage, and Instagram-worthy vacations in Bali.

But life doesn’t barter. The better I am at becoming my better self, and the more committed and devoted I become to God, I still don’t get to turn it all into a vending machine where good behavior spits out a conflict-free, hardship-free life. And spiritual practice isn’t a workaround to avoid suffering, it’s how we stay awake inside it.

Life contains suffering, not as a punishment or a mistake, but as its very nature. The Buddha saw this. It is the First Noble Truth. This isn’t pessimism, it’s liberation. It is an uncomfortable and hard truth, which means it is likely to be true. When we accept that suffering is inherent to existence rather than a deviation from how things “should” be, we stop wasting energy fighting reality. We stop believing in the toxic myth that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.

So, where does this leave me? If I can't count on divine intervention, if life isn't fair, if suffering is inevitable - then what?

It leaves me here, poking holes in my own belief system. Questioning not to destroy my faith, but to go deeper within it and breathe more freely inside it. I am seeing what holds up under pressure, and what can be discarded. I am developing the courage to ask better questions, and I am finding the humility to live without answers.

And strangely, I am letting go and releasing the rigid, parental deity that I once thought existed and discovering a God that is much more mature and stable. A presence that is softer and stronger. Unfragmented and unshakable. It feels like being invited into something more honest, more whole, and unified. A space that welcomes my doubt as gladly as my devotion.

I no longer experience God as a taskmaster or a judge with a clipboard, or a stern parent, and I have stopped performing piety to earn approval to make it to Heaven, or my next life. I am learning to keep showing up fully in my real life, despite the hardships that are being delivered, and I am trusting this spacious, honest, divine presence can hold my fear, my joy, my questions, and even the parts of me that don’t know how to believe right now.

It takes courage to question and dismantle your own belief system, knowing that some things might not survive the examination. But I am also trusting that what remains will be more authentic and resilient. It is a movement from an external, rule-based relationship with the divine, one that required constant improvements and dampening down my questioning and skeptical rebellious nature, to something more intimate, integrated, and internal. I am now attuning to a God that embraces all of me, even the dark and wild parts—a presence vast enough to hold the whole of who I am. Because being human was never the problem, it is how I was born. I don’t need to transcend my humanity to touch the sacred. I need to deepen into it. And I don’t need to become a God, in a human world. I need to become more fully human in a Godly world—one already saturated with the divine.

And that comes with understanding what a human life truly is—one that suffers. From illness, loss, death, grief, imperfection, shortcomings, flaws, and inadequacies. A life that forgets, falls apart, breaks open, and begins again. This is a more grown-up belief. One rooted not in denial, but in the sobering truth that I will get sick, and I will die. Not as punishment, but as part of the human condition. It’s not cynicism—it’s accuracy. And somehow, it’s also a kind of grace. It gives me the agency to live my fullest in every moment I have. And to really, and finally, let go of everything else. No more FOMO, no more games, no more hanging out with unhealthy people. I am growing up and advocating for myself to handle my own life, not waiting for God, or anyone else, for that matter, to do it for me.

What I am discovering is, for me, true spiritual maturity emerges when I transcend the conditional covenant, I once struck with the divine—that transactional, utilitarian relationship where God existed as my celestial insurance policy, worthy of devotion only when fortune smiled upon me. The belief in a God that left me paralyzed when bad things happened to good people, and I couldn’t comprehend why. This required me to move beyond an infantile spirituality that embraced the sacred as harbinger of blessing, yet recoiled in bitter rejection when that same divine presence manifested through suffering, loss, or the stark randomness of mortal existence.

This deeper wisdom coincides with my psychological maturity, prompting me to release my grip on a God that I had been demanding to conform to my needs for security and explanation. It’s about letting my faith grow up, as I do the same. Letting it become more real, more honest, and adult with harder issues that require deeper rooting in presence and love. Otherwise, we miss the moments of our own lives, wishing things were different. Sleepwalking and in a trance. And in doing so, I risk remaining imprisoned in a perpetual cycle where I keep dragging my child-mind before a parental God, railing into the void that life isn’t fair, demanding justice from a universe that never promised it. If it promised anything, it was to learn how to be more human and to accept all that comes with that birthright.

Silly me, I wanted to fashion God in the image of my own personal desires. I was creating a deity whose worth I measured by the comfort of my circumstances. Now, instead, it calls me toward radical acceptance of it all—the good and the bad. I am encountering the sacred not as guarantor of my preferences, but as the very ground of being itself, present equally in ecstasy and anguish, in the gift of miracles, and in their absence.

Such maturity does not ask me to welcome suffering, but rather to recognize that our relationship with the transcendent cannot be contingent upon its utility to my immediate comfort. It is the hard-won understanding that the divine—if it exists at all—is not diminished by my pain, nor validated by my prosperity. In this recognition lies a profound freedom: the liberation from needing God to be anything other than what God is, unfiltered by the lens of my human need for protection, well-being, or reward. That is my responsibility, and no one else’s.

This shift represents both a psychological and existential transformation in how I understand transcendence itself. And it doesn’t feel like my previous faith is falling apart, it is just maturing, expanding, evolving. It feels like being held exactly as I am—even as I question, even when my little rebellion self comes out. It approves of my skepticism. It welcomes doubt and exploration, as if doubt and faith can coexist and even strengthen each other.

There’s something paradoxically freeing about releasing the need to have everything figured out, to let mystery be mystery. Because real faith—the kind that survives—isn’t built on having all the answers. It’s built on being able to stay in relationship with the mystery. To trust that the sacred isn’t fragile, and neither am I.

So, yes, I still look before I cross the street.

In the absence of certainty, and a world where nothing is guaranteed, I would imagine even the new Pope would too. And I do it not because I’ve lost faith, but because I’ve stopped expecting faith to grant me immunity from reality. I’ve stopped treating God like a cosmic vending machine, and life like a transaction. The truth is, I no longer pray in hopes of bending the universe to my will. I pray because it connects me to something vast, something still, something that helps me stay present when life refuses to make sense.

The sacred hasn't become less mysterious or profound to me - if anything, it's become more so. But it's no longer somewhere else, or something else. It is here, right here within me, and all around me, forever and always. It’s the space I’ve been standing in the whole time. The silence that holds every prayer. The awareness that remains when the bargaining ends.

And the most liberating part is that I no longer need to become someone else, someone more perfect, someone who cusses less, someone who never loses her temper, someone who never does bad things that feel good, and someone who gives more service to others; I can relinquish all that striving and still feel God’s presence. What a relief.

It is already there, embracing me just as I am. It’s not waiting on a mountain or hidden in a reward. It doesn’t require more action or more performance. It’s right here, in the contradiction. In the ache and in the beauty. It’s in the simultaneous reaching and letting go. It’s the very space in which all seeking and finding and surrendering happens, the constant presence that was here long before I started asking questions, and seeking, and it will be here long after I stop.

In the meantime, I am taking responsibility for my human life down here with my feet on the ground. I look both ways before crossing the street. I take ownership of my mistakes and my flawed humanness. I do everything “humanly” possible when I get sick or suffer.

And, I also pray, meditation, sit quietly in contemplation and reflection, and attune to what God feels like. Love and presence. I seek comfort in mystery and still get second opinions. I make offerings and spreadsheets. I talk to God while also talking to my oncologist. It’s not either/or. It never was.

Stephen Hawking, toward the end of his life, also asked, “Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?”

That’s the real question. Not whether God will intervene on my behalf, but what breathes meaning, presence, and love into a life that holds no promises. That’s the mystery I find myself circling back to—not a God who spares some and not others, but the sacred itself as the container for everything: pain, joy, doubt, awe, and all the terrifying in-between.

And maybe that’s the most radical discovery of all: What we’ve been searching for was never missing in the first place. It just wasn’t where we were told to look—outside of us. And it didn’t present in a way we were expecting—requiring us to do more or be more. It’s been here all along, breathing fire into these questions. So, I’ll keep asking. Keep praying. Keep researching. Keep showing up. Not because I’m certain, but because presence itself is the ground I now trust—even when everything else feels like it’s falling. Because maybe faith isn’t about finding answers. Maybe it’s about learning how to stay in the room when there aren’t any. So, maybe “God’s plan” all along was never about orchestrating every detail of my life. Maybe it’s simply to realize I am fully human, living a fully human life—and God is the spaciousness that holds it all, the field in which it unfolds. A stage of presence that I get to play in, and maybe that’s more than enough.

But don’t take my word for it, you’ll have to decide for yourself.