There is a reason they call the Ryman the Mother Church of Country Music. Before it was a stage, it was a tabernacle. The pews are still wooden, the stained glass is still there, and some nights, when the right voices fill the room, you can feel why people used to come here looking for something more than a song.
That is where I was the night Drew and Ellie Holcomb sang “Maybe You Will.”
If you do not know it, the song is a quiet reframe of everything we tend to tell ourselves about the futures that feel out of reach. Landing the job on the top floor. Finding the person of your dreams. Getting the answers you have been longing for. The song does not argue with the doubt. It does not try to convince. Drew and Ellie just trade the lines back and forth, two voices gently turning the camera around. And then comes the turn that the whole song is built on: “But then again, maybe you will.”
That was the line that caught me sideways. That was the moment a question landed in my chest:
Am I living a life of doubt, or a life of promises yet to come?
It was not accusing. It was honest. The kind of question that does not arrive when you are trying to think it up, only when you have gone quiet enough to hear it.
I sat with it the rest of the night. I am still sitting with it.
Doubt is sneaky. It rarely walks in the front door announcing itself. It comes in as worry, as a worst-case scenario rehearsed at 2 a.m., as a quiet conviction that the good thing you are hoping for is probably not for you. Most of us are not sitting around debating whether God exists. We are just living, day by day, as though the promises we say we believe were written for someone else’s life.
And Scripture is full of those promises.
In Jeremiah 29:11, God speaks over a people in exile, people who had every reason to assume their best days were behind them, and tells them he knows the plans he has for them. Plans to prosper and not to perish. Plans for a future and a hope.
In 2 Corinthians 1:20, Paul writes that in Christ, every one of God’s promises is Yes and Amen. Not maybe. Not someday for someone better. Yes and Amen.
In Psalm 84:11, the psalmist says of the Lord that no good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly.
These are not soft suggestions. They are extravagant, almost reckless, in their generosity. And if I am honest, I have spent a lot of my life squinting at them, wondering whether they really mean what they say, or whether some piece of fine print disqualifies me.
Here is what I am coming to believe. Doubt is not humility. It often dresses up as humility, but underneath, it can be a way of protecting myself from disappointment. If I do not lean fully into the promise, I do not have to risk the heartbreak of it not unfolding the way I imagined.
But Scripture does not invite us into cautious belief. It invites us into abundance. A life lived out of the conviction that the Father is good, that He hears, that He is for me. Not because of anything I have earned, but because of who He is.
What would it look like to walk through tomorrow as though the promises were true? To make a decision, take a step, love someone hard, without the constant interior negotiation with the worst-case scenario? To stop treating the voice of the enemy, the one whispering it will not happen for you, as though it were a wise counselor instead of a liar?
I do not know yet. I am new at this. But I think the question itself is part of the answer, because the fact that it landed in the middle of a concert, in a room full of strangers, means it was waiting for me to slow down enough to be asked.
And the longer I sit with it, the more another line from that same song keeps surfacing: “It’s a miracle we’re livin’ in a world that’s always spinnin”
That is the part doubt always wants me to forget. That I am here at all. That breath is moving in and out of my lungs on a planet that has not stopped turning. That the God who keeps the world spinning is the same God who has spoken good over my life. If that is true, even on the ordinary days, then the abundant life is not a distant promise. It is already in motion.
If you are reading this and the same question is finding you tonight, you do not have to figure out the whole answer right now. You just have to stop arguing on behalf of the lie that the promises are for someone else’s life.
The promises are Yes and Amen. And they have your name on them.
Maybe you will not walk into tomorrow believing that. But then again. Maybe you will.
— Branden Pearson