In
the last few weeks or so, I’ve been going through what I’ve come to call my “quarter-life
crisis”. This has been a time for me to stop and evaluate everything that I’ve
been doing, what my goals are, what I want out of my education and who I want
to be. Needless to say, this has been a heavy time. Out of this heavy time,
however, there has been beauty. There is something great about stopping to
survey the landscape of one’s life. You get fresh perspective on what you’re
doing and it can be an encouraging and energizing time. One of my favorite
people, Michael Gungor, covers it well in his book “The Crowd, the Critic, and
the Muse”. He describes times like these as climbing out of the valley of the
Grand Canyon to the edge and looking at the big picture in all of its God-given
beauty and then making one’s way back to the bottom where the work gets done.
From
a lot of these ponderings, there is one thing that has come to light and that
is that I have some serious decisions to make; ones that could change
everything. While I’m not studied or skilled in metaphysics, I do believe in
some sort of butterfly effect. I believe it’s evident when I reflect on how (for
better or worse) one selfish decision in my past set in motion events that
would eventually put me where I am today. Now, I can’t know whether some of
these things would have happened regardless of that decision, but I do know
what did happen and it’s the actualities that lend themselves to support some
theory of chain reactions where if we had chosen a different page in life’s “choose
your own adventure” book, things would have been dramatically different.
So,
I thought I’d share some of the insights that have helped me along in this
big-decision-making time in my life. If you can use them, God love you for it.
If not, well, thanks for spending some time reading my thoughts; it does mean
something to me that you’re just reading it at all.
First
and foremost in our decision making process, we need to understand that some
things in life simply take priority. For me, this is an easy enough thing to
distinguish. I intend to devote my life as a servant-minister to other
Christians in some capacity. What that actually looks like is evolving and what
that will look like in ten years, no one can say. But for me, the bottom line
is simple.
This got me thinking about how one can feel
assured that one made the right decision and the truth is that you can’t. It’s
difficult to swallow, so take some sugar with it, but the truth is that you
will never know beyond a shadow of doubt that you made the best decision.
Thankfully, Scripture and tradition tells us that God has our best interest at
heart and, though we’ll mess up (and we will), he can make beautiful things out
of our mess. This isn’t an excuse to not try, but it is encouragement in the
face of uncertainty. So in order to attempt to make a broader rule of thumb in
regards to decision making, I’ll offer the following statement (that I tweeted
earlier):
“The
only true obligation you have is to love God with all that you are and then to
love people like he does”.
It
seems like a simple modification of Jesus’ two greatest commands and what
theologians refer to as Jesus’ “new command” and it is, but what I have done is
set it in the context of decision making. For those of us in the position to
make these decisions, we need to keep one thing at the forefront as our primary
decision-making filter: love God. Thankfully, this can be done in innumerable
places, times and processes. So this first and greatest command actually
alleviates a lot of stress while still narrowing our options down. Thus, we
must first ask “which of these options best demonstrates my love for God?” Now,
don’t be discouraged if this doesn’t narrow it down too much; like I said,
loving God can look like any number of actions.
The
next filter or standard we then use is “loving people” and not just loving
people like we’re comfortable loving people, but loving people like God loves
people. This raises the standard to an unreachable height, but it is inspiring
because we can reach beyond our natural capabilities (via God’s Spirit) and
touch the heart of those that God loves. Loving like God means loving when it’s
hard and uncomfortable or even painful. It means costing you something of
yourself and it means possibly facing rejection. Take heart, though: Jesus
himself faced those things so that he could demonstrate God’s great love for
us. So this next filter also doesn’t narrow down the options too much because
there are people everywhere and, thus, you can love people wherever you are in
contact with them.
Now,
you might be thinking “I thought this blog was going to be helpful” or “can’t
you just tell me what the right thing to do is?”And while I wish I had all the
answers, the reality is that we’ve each been given tasks to accomplish and no
one can do yours for you.
We
can, however, be encouraged that God extends ridiculous amounts of grace. I’m
writing a song right now that starts with this line: “God is not the god of the
necessary, but he is the god of extravagancy…” I believe that’s true and within
that extravagancy, we find that he only asks two life-defining things of us: to
love him with everything and love people like he does. When these are our
parameters of decision making, we find that it takes a lot to get outside of
his grace. He gives us room to make real decisions and while many Christians
will pray “your will be done”, many don’t realize that within his perfect will,
he gives us choices. God is so creative that he created creatures that create
and can reason like he does and make decisions like he does. It’s part of who
we are.
So
I apologize if I didn’t make your decision-making-process any easier, but I
hope you can take this as encouragement that there is grace extended to you in
whatever you decide. There is a broad plethora of options, all of which allow
for your only true obligation (as opposed to the ones we place on ourselves):
Love
God with everything that you are and love people like he does.
Grace and Peace to you all,
The Dread
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