Watch a teenager wait for anything.
I mean really watch. The physical restlessness when the wifi takes more than three seconds to load. The way they reach for their phone during any pause in conversation, any moment of silence, any gap between activities. The genuine discomfort on their faces when they have to sit with not knowing something for longer than it takes to Google it.
Now watch that same teenager try to pray about a decision. Try to “wait on God’s timing.” Try to sit in uncertainty about their future without immediately reaching for something that promises answers.
It’s not that they don’t want to trust God. Many of them genuinely do. It’s that they’ve been trained, at a neurological level, to experience uncertainty as a crisis that requires immediate resolution. And we’re asking them to practice a faith that often requires the exact opposite.
I’m not writing this to make you feel guilty about screen time or add to your already long list of parenting concerns. I’m writing it because I think understanding what’s happening helps us respond with compassion instead of frustration. And because I’ve spent years studying what this pattern looks like in adults… and I’d rather we catch it earlier.
The Reflex No One Taught
Here’s something that took me a while to understand: we don’t just learn information from our devices. We learn reflexes.
Every notification answered within seconds trains the brain to expect immediate response. Every question Googled the moment it arises teaches that not-knowing is a temporary state that should be resolved as quickly as possible. Every scroll through endless content reinforces that boredom or discomfort can always be escaped with a swipe.
These aren’t conscious lessons. No one sits down and teaches: “When you feel uncertain, you should immediately seek information to make the feeling stop.” But it’s what the nervous system learns anyway, through thousands of tiny repetitions every day.
And then we ask teenagers to pray and wait. To trust God with questions He hasn’t answered. To sit in the discomfort of not knowing what’s coming next.
We’re asking them to use a muscle they’ve never been trained to use. Sometimes one they’ve been actively trained not to use.
(I want to be clear here: I’m not blaming the teens. Or the parents. Or even the technology, really. I’m trying to describe a formation pattern that’s happening to all of us, so we can respond thoughtfully rather than reactively.)
What the Anxiety Actually Wants
When I studied adults who struggle with spiritual uncertainty, certain phrases kept appearing over and over in their descriptions of themselves: “I don’t deal with the unknown well.” “I feel restless about a lot in my life.” “I constantly need to know what will happen.”
The anxiety isn’t just uncomfortable. It’s physically overwhelming. It creates a kind of agitation that demands relief.
And here’s the hidden assumption underneath that agitation, the thing most people don’t realize they believe: peace is a knowledge problem, not a trust problem.
In other words: if I just knew what was going to happen, I’d finally be okay. If I just had enough information, enough certainty, enough clarity about the future, then the anxiety would stop. The solution to my distress is more information.
But what if that’s backwards?
What if the anxiety isn’t asking for more information? What if it’s asking for something else entirely… the capacity to be okay even without certainty?
The adults I study discovered (often painfully) that more information doesn’t satisfy the craving. When you treat anxiety with certainty-seeking, you don’t reduce the need. You strengthen it. You train the brain that it can’t function without immediate answers.
The peace that certainty promises? It never actually arrives. Because there’s always another decision, another unknown, another gap between what you know and what you wish you knew.
Where Psychology Meets Formation
Here’s where the psychological reality meets the spiritual one, and I think this is important for us to name explicitly.
The capacity to tolerate uncertainty isn’t just a mental health skill. It’s the foundation of faith. Not faith as “believing the right things,” but faith as the active practice of trusting someone you can’t see with outcomes you can’t control.
When a teenager has been trained that not-knowing is an emergency, we’re not just asking them to change a habit. We’re asking them to operate from a completely different understanding of how peace actually works.
And we have to ask ourselves honestly: have we inadvertently reinforced the same pattern?
Some of our well-meaning approaches (the “God has a perfect plan” assurances, the pressure to have confident answers to every hard question, the expectation that faith should feel certain) might accidentally strengthen the very reflex we’re trying to address. We promise peace through right answers when Scripture promises peace through right relationship. We model theological certainty when maybe we should be modeling faithful uncertainty.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t teach doctrine or answer questions. But I wonder if sometimes our eagerness to provide clarity communicates that not-knowing is a problem to be solved rather than a space where trust is built.
Where This Road Leads
I want to describe what I see in adults who were formed this way, not to scare you but because I think it helps to know where the road leads.
These adults are often deeply sincere in their faith. They love God. They want to trust Him. But they’ve developed what I can only describe as an addiction to certainty-seeking.
They describe setting boundaries with themselves (“I’ll stop checking tomorrow”) and breaking them by noon. They feel crushing guilt because they know their compulsive need for answers reflects something broken in their trust. They compare themselves to other Christians who seem to wait on God easily, and they wonder what’s uniquely wrong with them.
Their anxiety isn’t a character flaw. It’s a trained reflex. And by the time many of them realize what’s happened, the pattern is deeply ingrained.
One of the most painful things I hear from these adults is their sense that God feels silent while their anxiety feels deafening. Prayer feels inadequate. Waiting feels impossible. And anything that promises answers right now feels like the only thing that helps… even when they know it’s not good for them.
They didn’t choose this pattern. They were formed into it, one immediate response at a time, starting when they were young. And now they’re trying to unlearn reflexes that feel as natural as breathing.
A Word Before We Go Further
I need to say this clearly, because I know how it might land for some people.
When I talk about anxiety being connected to trust, I’m not saying anxiety is a spiritual flaw. I’m not suggesting that if someone just had more faith, their anxiety would disappear. That’s not how any of this works, and honestly, that kind of thinking has done real damage to people who are genuinely struggling.
Anxiety is real. Neurological. Often needs professional support alongside spiritual care.
But the reflex to resolve anxiety through immediate information-seeking? That’s a trained pattern. One that makes the already-difficult work of waiting feel nearly impossible.
Both things are true. The anxiety is real AND the pattern is learned. Getting help for the anxiety isn’t a failure of faith… it’s wisdom. (I’d argue it’s one of the most spiritual things you can do. God works through therapists too.)
So if you’re a parent or leader trying to help a teenager with this, hold both realities gently. Don’t shame them for their anxiety. But do help them build a different reflex.
The Capacity We’re Not Building
This is what I want to land on, and I say this with genuine care for the young people in your life: we need to think about this as a capacity issue, not a willpower issue.
Telling a teenager to “just trust God” when they’ve never developed the ability to tolerate uncertainty is like telling someone to run a marathon when they’ve never jogged around the block. It’s not that they’re refusing. It’s that the capacity isn’t there.
And the capacity has to be built. Slowly. Through practice. Through small exposures to uncertainty that gradually increase their tolerance. Through experiences of waiting that don’t destroy them, that show them they can survive not-knowing.
This isn’t a one-time conversation. It’s a formation project.
The Psalmist understood something about this. In Psalm 27, David writes: “Wait patiently for the Lord. Be brave and courageous. Yes, wait patiently for the Lord” (Psalm 27:14, NLT).
Notice how he has to say it twice. Wait… yes, wait. Like he knows how hard it is. Like he’s coaching himself through the discomfort of it.
And there’s something about the word “patiently” that won’t let me go. In Hebrew, it carries this sense of binding yourself to something, of actively holding on rather than passively waiting. It’s not “sit there and zone out until God shows up.” It’s “tie yourself to trust even when everything in you wants to reach for a shortcut.”
That’s a skill. An active discipline. Something that has to be practiced, not just believed.
What Building Capacity Actually Looks Like
I don’t have a neat five-step program for this. I wish I did. But here are some things I keep coming back to, and maybe they’re worth trying.
Start small. Really small. What would it look like to let a teenager sit with a question until tomorrow before researching every angle? Or to ask them to wait 24 hours before texting back someone they’re anxious about… not as punishment, but as practice? What if you drove somewhere without GPS and figured it out together? What if you sat in silence for ten minutes, not filling it with content or conversation, simply… being there?
The goal isn’t to create trauma around not-knowing. It’s to create small experiences of surviving uncertainty. “That was uncomfortable, but I didn’t die” is actually a profound lesson for a nervous system that’s been trained to treat discomfort as an emergency.
Sit with them in it. Here’s something specific you could try: the next time your teenager is visibly anxious about a decision, don’t offer to help them figure it out. Instead, say something like: “Let’s just sit with this for five minutes. You don’t have to solve it right now. I’ll stay here.”
And then actually sit there. Quietly. Not fixing. Not advising. Just being present to their discomfort without rescuing them from it.
That might be the most countercultural thing you do all week.
Name what’s happening. What if you said it out loud? “I notice you seem really uncomfortable not knowing what’s going to happen. That makes sense… we’re all trained to want immediate answers. But I wonder if we could practice sitting with this for a bit before we try to solve it.”
There’s real power in naming the pattern without shaming it. It gives them language for what they’re experiencing and permission to respond differently.
Are We Modeling Something Different?
Because honestly, I have to ask myself this too.
If we’re reaching for our phones the moment we feel uncertain, if we’re Googling every question within seconds of asking it, if we’re demonstrating that not-knowing is an emergency that requires immediate resolution… why would they do anything different?
I don’t say this to pile on more parenting guilt. (You have enough of that already, I’m sure.) But formation happens more through what we model than what we say. If they see us sitting with uncertainty, praying without demanding immediate answers, being okay with “I don’t know yet”… that teaches them something no lecture ever could.
What Scripture Actually Promises
There’s a passage in James that’s been on my mind lately. He writes about asking God for wisdom and actually expecting to receive it, but then he says this: “But when you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind” (James 1:6, NLT).
Stability. Rootedness. The ability to stay anchored even when the answers don’t come immediately.
But notice what the stability is rooted in: “faith is in God alone.” Not faith in having all the answers. Not faith in certainty. Faith in God Himself.
The promise isn’t “trust God and He’ll tell you exactly what’s going to happen.” The promise is “trust God and you won’t be tossed around by every wave of uncertainty that hits you.” That’s a different kind of peace altogether. One that doesn’t require knowing what’s coming… just knowing who’s holding you while you wait.
And maybe that’s what we’re being invited into. God’s silence isn’t abandonment. It’s the training ground where trust gets built. The space where we learn to be held without being told.
It makes me wonder what it would look like to teach that kind of anchoring before the anxiety patterns set in.
If a Teenager Reads This
(I realize this might end up in front of a young person, so let me say this directly.)
If you’re reading this because your parent or youth leader sent it to you, I want you to know: this isn’t about criticizing you. I know what it feels like to need answers right now. I know the physical restlessness that makes waiting feel impossible. I know what it’s like when your anxiety is so loud that prayer feels inadequate and anything promising immediate relief feels like the only thing that helps.
I’m not writing this to make you feel broken. I’m writing it because the adults who love you need to understand what’s really happening so they can support you better. Not with more lectures about trusting God, but with patient, present, grace-filled practice at tolerating uncertainty together.
And honestly? The fact that waiting feels nearly impossible for you isn’t a spiritual failure. It’s evidence of how you’ve been formed. That formation can be gently, gradually shifted. But it takes practice, not just belief. And it often takes getting support for the anxiety itself, not just white-knuckling through it hoping faith will make it disappear.
You’re not uniquely broken. You’re learning to use a muscle you’ve never been trained to use.
What I’m Still Figuring Out
I won’t pretend I have this solved. I’m still learning what it means to wait well, and I grew up with far less instant-access technology than today’s teenagers.
I know what it feels like to be convinced that my anxiety was simply stronger than my faith. To believe I was somehow uniquely wired in a way that made trusting God impossible. To wonder why other Christians seemed to wait on the Lord easily while I had this constant hum of “but what if” running in the background of every decision.
What I’m slowly discovering is that waiting isn’t passive. It’s not “sit there and hope God eventually shows up.” It’s an active binding of yourself to trust, even when everything in you wants to reach for a shortcut. It’s choosing, over and over, to bring your uncertainty to God instead of to something that promises faster answers.
And it’s building that capacity slowly, through practice, through small exposures to not-knowing that prove you can survive it.
Some Things Worth Sitting With
I’m not going to wrap this up neatly. That would kind of undermine the whole point.
But here are some questions I keep returning to:
What would it look like to create small experiences of waiting that aren’t traumatic? Not “throw their phone in the ocean” approaches, but gentle opportunities to practice being okay with not-knowing?
What if the young people in your life saw you sitting with uncertainty, not anxiously trying to resolve it, but genuinely at peace in the not-knowing? What would that model for them?
And what if “wait on the Lord” isn’t primarily about patience, but about where you’re placing your weight while you wait?
There’s more I want to explore here… something about what Isaiah says about those who wait on the Lord renewing their strength, and what that actually looks like neurologically. But that’s probably a different reflection.
For now, here’s what I know: the capacity to trust God in uncertainty, to wait without demanding immediate answers, to be okay with not-knowing… this isn’t a nice-to-have spiritual skill. It’s foundational to a faith that survives real life.
Because real life includes seasons where God is silent. Decisions where the right path isn’t clear. Long stretches of “not yet” that don’t come with explanations or timelines.
And if we haven’t built the capacity to tolerate those seasons, we’ll reach for something else. Anything that promises answers. Anything that offers immediate relief from the discomfort of waiting.
The adults I study did exactly that. And most of them wish someone had helped them build a different capacity when they were younger.
I think the young people you love are worth that effort. Even if it’s uncomfortable. Even if it goes against everything the digital environment is training them to expect.
We’re swimming upstream here. But that’s okay. Some things are worth swimming upstream for.
And if you’re wondering where to start… tonight, if you get the chance, just try this: the next time they’re anxious about something, sit with them in it for five minutes. No fixing. No researching. No solving. Just being there, present to the discomfort, showing them they can survive not-knowing because you’re surviving it together.
That’s enough for now. See what shifts.
