Prophets appear during uncertainty. That is when we need them most. They emerge when kingdoms tremble, when institutions fracture, when familiar maps stop working and the future becomes opaque. The great stories understand this instinctively. Shakespeare summons fools, ghosts, witches, and visionaries whenever kingdoms lose their bearings. The prophets of Israel emerge during exile, occupation, drought, war, and collapse. In Azeroth, prophets arise when worlds are breaking apart and old certainties no longer hold. For me few figures embody this role more completely than Macros the Black in Raymond E Feist’s universe. Appearing at the edges of history, moving between worlds, times, and dimensions, Macros rarely offers simple answers. Instead, he intervenes at moments of profound crisis, guiding events toward possibilities others cannot yet perceive. Like the prophets of old, he inhabits the threshold between what is and what might become, carrying a vision larger than any kingdom, empire, or age. Prophets belong to liminal spaces. They stand between what was and what might yet be.
Yet there is something we often forget. The prophet rarely feels as certain as they sound. Moses begs God to send somebody else. Cassandra sees the fall of Troy yet is cursed never to be believed. Jeremiah accuses God of deceiving him. In Frank Herbert’s Dune, Paul Atreides glimpses possible futures later revealed as the Golden Path, but is haunted by his inability to fully control where those visions will lead. Jonah boards a ship in the opposite direction. Elijah collapses beneath a tree and asks to die. In Azeroth, Medivh carries visions of possible destinies while wrestling with the immense cost of the choices before him. Even Jesus enters Gethsemane asking whether another path is possible. Beneath the confidence of prophecy often lies profound uncertainty. The prophet is not the person who possesses certainty; the prophet is the person who continues speaking when certainty has disappeared. Perhaps that is why prophetic voices are so difficult to recognise. We imagine them as people with answers. More often they are people wrestling with the same doubts as everyone else, yet somehow refusing to surrender hope. They stand in the fog with the rest of us. The difference is that they continue to imagine a horizon beyond it.
Lately I have found myself thinking about that fog. Not because I have lost hope, but because I have become increasingly aware of how much of life is lived without certainty. There are moments when an unexpected outcome does not merely challenge our expectations; it challenges our confidence in the way we make sense of the world. The facts may remain unchanged. The future may remain open. Yet something shifts internally. The question quietly changes from “Was I right?” to “Can I trust my own judgement?” That is a far more unsettling question. It is also one that seems to surface whenever a person finds themselves standing at the threshold between one chapter of life and the next.
Which is why I find myself returning to Star Trek. Beneath the warp drives and technobabble, Star Trek has always been fascinated by uncertainty. In the episode Peak Performance, the android Data plays a strategic game against the Zakdorn master Kolrami, a species renowned for seeing patterns and predicting outcomes. Data loses. It should be a minor setback. Instead, it becomes an existential crisis. He begins running self-diagnostics, examining his memory pathways, testing his processing systems, searching for a fault that might explain the discrepancy between expectation and reality. Every test comes back normal, yet the doubt remains. What fascinates me is not that Data loses but that he immediately turns inward. The game becomes secondary. The real crisis is no longer about the outcome; it is about trust. If his calculations failed once, can he trust them again?
For an android, this is a technical problem. Whether existential crises can become spiritual ones for androids is a question for another blog. For humans, however, it is often a spiritual one. Sometimes a disappointing outcome does not merely challenge our conclusions; it challenges our confidence in the process that produced them. We begin running our own diagnostics. We replay conversations. We revisit decisions. We question instincts that once seemed reliable. We search for faults that may not exist. The diagnosis becomes more frightening than the defeat. Data’s crisis resonates because it exposes a deeply human fear: that one unexpected result might reveal something fundamentally broken within us.
A similar tension emerges in Time Squared, when Jean-Luc Picard encounters a version of himself from six hours in the future. The future Picard appears exhausted, frightened, and unable to explain what has happened. Most disturbing of all, he seems powerless to prevent it. The episode presents a strange paradox. If the future already exists, what role remains for discernment? If tomorrow has already been written, what becomes of choice? Picard spends the episode attempting to solve the puzzle, but the deeper lesson is that the future cannot be controlled into submission. It must be inhabited. There are moments in life when we desperately want certainty about what comes next. We want guarantees. We want evidence. We want someone from the future to tell us which path is safe. Instead we are left with ambiguity and the responsibility to choose anyway.
This is where the work of Jürgen Moltmann becomes particularly illuminating. Moltmann argued that transformative hope is fundamentally different from optimism. Optimism studies present conditions and predicts favourable outcomes. Hope refuses to believe that present conditions possess the final word. The prophets were not optimists. Jeremiah certainly was not. Ezekiel staring into a valley of dry bones was not. The women approaching a sealed tomb on Easter morning were not. Hope emerges precisely where certainty fails. It is not confidence that everything will work out according to plan. It is trust that possibilities exist beyond our capacity to imagine them. The future, in Moltmann’s thought, remains open because God is not finished with creation.
Perhaps nowhere in Star Trek is this tension explored more beautifully than in Far Beyond the Stars. Benjamin Sisko experiences life as Benny Russell, a Black science-fiction writer in 1950s America struggling to tell a story the world refuses to hear. Benny imagines a future centred on a Black commander of a space station, yet publishers, editors, and society itself insist such a future is impossible. As the episode unfolds, reality becomes increasingly unstable. Is Benny dreaming Sisko? Is Sisko dreaming Benny? The question is never resolved, which is perhaps unsurprising in a series where this sort of thing happens because of Prophets—but don’t get me started on wormhole aliens. Instead, the episode asks something more profound. Can you remain faithful to a vision when external validation disappears? Can you continue imagining a future that nobody else can see?
Benny Russell’s struggle is prophetic in the deepest sense. He is not predicting the future. He is refusing to surrender his imagination to the limitations of the present. Like Jeremiah purchasing a field while Jerusalem falls, like Ezekiel speaking to dry bones, like Cassandra foreseeing disaster yet remaining unheard, like Velen carrying a vision of hope across millennia of exile and uncertainty, like the biblical prophets daring to envision restoration in the midst of collapse, Benny continues telling a story that reality itself appears to contradict. His breakdown is heartbreaking precisely because it emerges not from certainty but from hope. He does not know. He believes. There is a difference.
This insight brings us unexpectedly to Johan Huizinga. In Homo Ludens, Huizinga argues that human beings are not merely rational creatures; we are playful creatures. Civilisation itself emerges through play. Art, religion, storytelling, ritual, culture, and even politics arise because human beings are capable of stepping into spaces where outcomes remain unknown. Play is not the opposite of seriousness. Play is the opposite of determinism. To play is to enter a world where the future has not yet been decided. To play is to participate in creation itself.
Suddenly Data’s crisis looks very different. The problem was never that he lost. The problem was that he stopped playing. He transformed a game into a verdict. He confused an outcome with an identity. Many of us do the same. We treat setbacks as diagnoses. We treat disappointments as prophecies. We treat uncertainty as evidence that something fundamental has gone wrong. Yet the wisdom of both Huizinga and Moltmann suggests another possibility. What if life is not a test we pass or fail? What if life is a game we are invited to continue playing? What if hope itself is a form of holy playfulness, the willingness to make another move even when the outcome remains uncertain? Games teach us this in a unique way. They allow us to relive situations, revisit decisions, and choose again. Through repetition we learn, adapt, and refine our judgement without being defined by a single outcome. Every new attempt becomes an opportunity to grow rather than a verdict on our worth.
In my recent convalescence, my reading, reflection, and writing have returned repeatedly to images of moss and mycelium. The more I reflect on those images, the more I suspect they are trying to teach me something about discernment. A mushroom appears briefly above the forest floor and then disappears. If that is all we can see, we might assume the organism has failed. Yet beneath the soil an immense network continues growing, connecting, exploring, exchanging resources, and preparing possibilities that have not yet emerged into view. Most of the life of the organism remains hidden. Most of the growth occurs underground.
Perhaps discernment works like that. Perhaps hope works like that. Perhaps faith itself works like that. We spend so much of our lives looking for visible evidence that we overlook the unseen networks quietly sustaining us beneath the surface. We demand certainty when what we actually need is trust. We seek answers when what we actually require is imagination. We want guarantees when what life more often offers is participation in an unfolding story whose meaning only becomes clear as we live it.
The prophets understood this. So did Moltmann, Huizinga, and Benny Russell. Eventually Data understood it too, though not without a little help from his friends. The future cannot be predicted with perfect accuracy. It resists our attempts to control it or reduce it to a solvable equation. Instead, it invites us forward one step at a time. Which leaves us with a choice. We can spend our lives demanding certainty before taking the next step, or we can keep imagining new possibilities, making meaning, and engaging the world with curiosity. Not because we know how the story ends, but because the Author is not finished writing it yet.
Though at times it may feel like it
The game is not over.
Not even close.
Never odd or even.
You’re on fire Will! Keep it up!