You can listen to this post read aloud or read it for yourself.

I have a brother who is at a life crossroads that feels like a significant turning point. I’ve been sensing his increasing angst and internal misery over trying to make the “right” decision about his future. He’s in his mid-thirties and has been trying to get into a PhD program for several years. This is the year; he finally got into one. You would think he’d be super excited. But he came by my house this past weekend, and I couldn’t help notice he seemed full of anxiety. Unsure seems to be the best way to describe his state of inner being. And chaotic. He’s wrestling with questions: Am I doing the right thing? Is it worth the cost? Will this be meaningful? He wants his life to matter. Don’t we all? But I can’t help feeling he’s looking at some of this from an unhelpful angle.

My last post was about trying to define meaningful work, and I thought I was done with that subject, but witnessing my brother’s angst is resulting in more thoughts. This post is dedicated as a love offering to you, brother. I hope you don’t feel outed in any way; I have nothing but compassion and respect for your state of being. We all need to hear this too. May we each find our own way to the light.

The “Right” Decision

Making the “right” decision is often tied in religious circles to concepts about the will of God. Is it the “will of God” for me to do this? My brother shared how he thought if this was the right step that he would feel that God was with him, confirming his choice. To some extent my translation of this is that if he was making the “right” choice, one God looked favorably upon, that it would feel better emotionally. Perhaps.  But perhaps not.

Myth #1: God has only one path for you to find.

The first concept I would invite you to reconsider is that given a set of options there is only one choice that is within the “will of God.” I think my brother may feel a bit paralyzed because he wants to know which choice is THE choice. One God would be for, and the other he would be against. Or at least, the other would be less than the optimal that God would want him to choose. God is not that binary.

My senior year of college, I had a professor who acknowledged students’ angst over trying to choose what to do next in life. Her overall stance was not to overthink it too much. Take a job. Start another degree. Whatever you choose, it doesn’t mean you are locked into that choice for the rest of your life. If it doesn’t work, you’ll have chances to choose something else later. At some point you just have to make the best decision you can and go for something. I appreciated that so much. It lowered the seemingly horrendously high stakes down to a more manageable level. She also recommended a book I read: The Will of God as a Way of Life by Gerald L. Sittser.

ideas of building platform in my post “Building Meaningful Work” (linked below).

I have a friend who found what he wanted to do in high school, got his degrees, and has worked the same job for the last thirty-seven years, never doubting he was made to do what he does. That’s unusual, a gift few of us receive. Most of us stumble through a series of attempts at degrees or jobs or areas of interest, searching for the fit that will bring the right spark. I would even venture that this angst over deciding what to do with our lives is a newer and more modern conundrum. Previous generations would’ve mostly been born into certain trades or spent most of their energy in life just putting a roof over their head and food on the table. Were they less inside the “will of God” for the lack of their choice or thought over what they had to do with their lives?

I find this binary question of whether a decision is in the “will of God” akin to asking the question, does God have one intended person for you to marry and spend your life with? My gut answer to that is no. But here’s what I can say with confidence – the will of God in my life now is the husband that I have, to be faithful to the relationship I have already chosen. If you don’t like that language, how about the phrase: my husband is the current reality of my life and being fully present includes saying yes to him. No authentic spiritual journey can occur in a vacuum outside the reality of present circumstances. Maybe I could’ve made an infinite number of different choices. But I chose the man who made me laugh and got me to play and who accepted me fully as I was in a time when I desperately needed that. He is a part of who I am now, and I can’t go back and change that. I wouldn’t want to.

Extrapolate that out to whatever your current circumstances are. Those circumstances include God’s will for your life. If you have kids, then parenting is part of God’s will for you life. If you’re in a current job, then those co-workers and those tasks are part of God’s will for your life. Can you choose or feel led to make a change someday. Sure. But today, those things are God’s will for your life.

Huge caveat here: I’m NOT saying that God is the orchestrator of trauma or grief or any number of difficult things that may be a part of your life. Those things are not God’s intended will for your life. But I am saying that God’s will for you is to not live in avoidance of those things. They are somehow incorporated into what “God’s will” for you is now. How can you face them now that they are part of your story? How can you be present to them, grow from them? This leads me to the second myth.

Myth #2: Suffering means you did something wrong.

Let’s kibosh the notion right now that suffering means you’ve somehow stepped outside of the will of God. That’s pure prosperity gospel, clean and simple. Throw that theology in the trash! This is another thing Sittser hammers hard in his book. The idea that if you are walking in the will of God your life will be fulfilled and happy and things will feel right is a misnomer that doesn’t serve us well. Especially when your application of that thought is tied to external realities. Sittser has a lot of platform to say this. He lost his mother, wife, and daughter in a single car accident. The notion that this would somehow be the result of him being outside the “will of God” is utterly cruel and unthinkable. I don’t want to coexist in the same universe with that kind of God.

Sittser’s situation is extreme and easier for us to reject as being tied to his conforming to “God’s will.” But this idea creeps into our lives in more subtle ways. I can’t help but think that my brother wonders if he’s outside the will of God because it doesn’t feel good right now. Is he somehow making a wrong decision because he is suffering? My answer is maybe. Or maybe not. He’s the only one who can parse that out.

I will say that suffering finds us all—in small daily ways and in life-altering large ways. My friend who had every confidence in his career path and even how many children he wanted to have, then lost his wife to cancer. No one plans for that.

The goal of the spiritual life is not to find a way to avoid suffering. The wisdom teachers all agree that often the path of suffering is the path to spiritual transformation. I’m not advocating that any of us go out and look for ways to make our lives miserable. There’s enough of that going around already. But it does mean that we don’t have to shy away from the suffering that does come or somehow see it as a failing or a sign that we’ve missed the “will of God.”

Truth #1: The “Will of God” is more obvious than we think.

In this moment, I would tell my brother that sometimes we get lost in the weeds of the big decisions. We get stuck thinking God’s will is external, when in reality it’s much more internal. God’s will has a lot more to do with inward orientation and how we approach what we do than with the what. To some extent I don’t think God cares about certain large decisions we have to make. He’s not calloused or unfeeling, but there are decisions in our lives that aren’t necessarily moral ones and he offers us a choice. Go to grad school or don’t go to grad school. God loves you the same. He’ll be with you the same. You can still learn to be more present in the world, more self-aware, more steadily on a journey of growth regardless of which external path you choose. So which path might offer you more contentment and satisfaction?

Sittser points out that there a lot of things about the “will of God” that are obvious. Here are some that I find in my life:

• Cultivating love and compassion towards my husband
• Giving my children strong attachment (and working to minimize my projection of internal frustration like raising my voice)
• Making space for habits that make me a more grounded and centered person.

We tend to make it so complicated, but in some ways “God’s will” can be boiled down to the golden rule: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Love your neighbor as yourself. Anything that fits within those bounds is a go. My translation goes like this: Work to be more fully present and compassionate towards myself, God, and others around me.

Grad school could fit within that list. Or it could be left out.

I quit my job recently. I won’t tell you that it was the “will of God.” I didn’t hear any voices. I didn’t have any divine inspiration. There were stressful things that aligned to cause me to reconsider my values. Then my husband and I made the decision that seemed right. I like to think I made a decision that helps me be true to the way God designed me to be. But I also don’t think continuing to teach would be wrong either.

Truth #2: God is not a God of chaos.

My deepest concern for my brother is that he seems to be in chaos internally. But I also know this is his journey and he’ll have to be the one to work through that chaos. It might be there as a teacher to show him something. However, I would say that chaos is a red flag. It doesn’t automatically give a clear answer for what to do with that chaos or how to resolve it, but it does signal a moment to pause and listen for wisdom to parse out why that chaos is there.

My own experience of not listening to chaos came during my stint in the cult. I was dating and got engaged to someone that year too. Looking back I was filled with all sorts of internal anxiety and chaos over both of these situations in my life. I kept taking them to God in these imaginative experiences the cult created called God Encounters (my drawback from this method now could fill a whole blogpost or more). Simplistically, I took my fears and anxieties to my perception of God within the sessions and thought that I was hearing things from God like “Trust me. Just jump off the cliff and take a leap of faith.” I visually did so in my imagination. The result was I thought that pushing through all those red flags was an act of faith.

I don’t believe that by a longshot anymore. I don’t know what I was hearing. My own ego masquerading as a divine experience? Who knows. But what I have learned since is to trust the internal state of my being as a check for discerning “the will of God” in my life if that’s what you want to call it. God is not a God of chaos. Looking back, I would tell my younger self to take heed and pause or move back. Don’t keep pressing in. God would not be telling me things that would cause such inner turmoil and unrest in my being.

So my humble advice is to acknowledge the chaos. Don’t hide from it or pretend it’s not there. Ask questions of it. Find a good therapist to help you parse out the answers if that helps. Or a spiritual director. But whoever you ask to help you discern, ultimately it needs to be someone who doesn’t think along these black-and-white perspectives of the will of God, someone who will ultimately recognize that discerning the good-enough path is something only you can do.

Then lean into being present. Learn what you can. And ultimately trust that the Divine One will hold you and catch you, that there is meaning beyond you. It means, yes, you are invited into something bigger than yourself. But also, it’s bigger than yourself, which means you aren’t really capable of screwing it up.

Joan Chittister writes, “Indeed, the learnings of the self may be simpler than we think. It may be little more than that final blinding recognition that circumstances of life are much less important than what we learn about what it means to become fully human because of them. But if that is the case, then there is no such thing as a ‘wasted’ life. There is no such thing as losing” (Called to Question, p. 59-60).

I speak that over your life, brother, as a benediction. And a beginning.

References:

• My previous post “Building Meaningful Work”
• The Will of God as a Way of Life by Gerald L. Sittser
• Called to Question by Joan Chittister (Chapter 7: Insight)

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