The wheels in my head have been spinning wildly the past few weeks, spinning over trying to figure out what the next steps of my life are to be, or what God wants me to do. I know change must occur, for my safety and sanity, but the details are elusive, like grasping at a wisp of smoke.
This leads me to ask: why is knowing God’s will so hard?
There are some things about God’s will that are easy for me to know, things like staying sober, staying on my healing journey, practicing love and compassion, praying constantly, seeking God in all ways, in all things, and in all people. Those are obvious…to me.
But the minute details of God’s will cause me much consternation, lack of sleep even; which is itself a contradiction. I am told by God not to worry, trust that the day will be provided for and know that if the lilies of the field neither sow nor reap yet they are the beauties of God then all shall be well for you and me.
But trust is elusive and sometimes those are just words on a page.
I want to know …specifics; specifics like what job, where to live, should I jump off the cliff and pursue the dream that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt God has placed in my heart? Or should I wait, wait, wait? My ‘Nana’ sent me some wisdom the other day, saying “until God opens the next door, praise him in the hallway.”
I love it. I get the feeling I am in the hallway, waiting, for the minutiae details of God’s specific will and plan for me to be revealed. Did you read that as I wrote it: intentionally laying out the obsessive need for perfection in specifics instead of child-like trust in a loving and faithful God?
I know it does not happen that way – learning God’s will is more about trust and leaning. I trust God to give guidance, examples, circumstances that are just for me so that I know God is intimately in the details of it all. And leaning, well I must lean hard on God. If all the knowledge and information came at once, well then I’d forget God and lean on the information given rather than the Giver.
God wants me to relax into him, trust, surrender, and release all. If I am practicing those disciplines then I am compelled to ask this odd question: does it even matter what choices I make, if I am seeking God, loving God, hungering for God to be revealed through my actions and life?
Do I have enough belief in God’s good love and great power to believe that there is no “wrong’ choice if I am always and in all ways at least attempting to seek God in every move?
If I am seeking God then I will not desire to fall back into addictive patterns, I will desire to be of service through love, I will be and become the embodiment of compassion. I will in truth be allowing God the space to reign and rule in my realm thereby making it the divine realm.
If that be the case, then do the minute details even matter: this job or that? Stay or go?
Sometimes my seeking God’s will obsessively turn my faith into what I call Parking Space Religion: demeaning my prayer life, and God, into a God of ‘find-me-a-parking space instead of a God Who is Untamed and Untamable – a flame of divine love. I know God has the hairs of my head numbered, but do I really want to reduce the Holy One to a Santa Claus dolling out parking spaces?
What I truly believe God wants from me is this: to trust the still, small Voice; the tender breeze blowing the fractured reed upright in the wind; to know that even when I cannot hold on to hope, God can and will for me…for God is indeed for me and you!
So, God’s will is not so much about the details, but the friendship. If I love God, which I do and God loves me, which he does then can I not repose into that safe place of trusting that discernment comes with the decisions needing to be made, not before.
If I hunger for God, long to do his bidding and I ask for wisdom and direction, it will indeed come as the daybreak follows the night. God cannot not lead me down the path I am supposed to walk for God is faithful even when I am not. And if God’s love is unconditional (it is!) and his presence every abiding (it is!) then how exactly is there a ‘wrong’ decision?
Is God so limited that he cannot work out the details through the very desires, passions and dreams he has placed within us? Or those that have welled up within us based on our taste, passions, gifts, wounds and fears?
Is not God all encompassing, all loving, all powerful and eternally Present?
If so then every choice, every action, every moment is held in the infinitely compassionate hands of God. There is no where that God is not. Period. It reminds me of St. Catherine of Siena’s oft quoted Truth that “all the way to heaven is in fact heaven because He said ‘I am the Way’.” And if it is God’s good pleasure to “give us the Kingdom” then all the way to the Kingdom is in fact the Kingdom (to paraphrase the aforementioned quote).
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