When you don’t know what to do
(I originally posted this message to my personal Facebook account on January 3, 2022. I’m posting it here in case someone who’s stumbled across my blog is hurting and needs to hear it.)
In the first half of 2020, I faced the hardest and most important decision of my life. It was completely unexpected and would affect not only the rest of my life, but the rest of my children’s lives and the lives of my extended family. Because of this, I sought God’s will more earnestly than I had ever sought it about anything. I asked God constantly to show me what I should do. I spent hours each day reading my bible and listening to sermons, searching for direction. For 5 long months, I waited for God to make His will clear. I felt sure He wanted one thing to happen and I knew He had the wisdom and power to make it happen, but that thing just wasn’t happening. In fact, the exact opposite seemed to be happening. I had never been more confused in my life. The agony seemed to just go on and on, and the burden of making the right decision was taking both a physical and emotional toll on me. I desperately wanted God to show me what to do.
One morning in mid-May, I took a walk down Firestone Avenue. The weather matched my mood- overcast and misting rain. My heart was so heavy. It seemed my whole life was on hold, waiting for me to make this terrible decision. God wasn’t doing what I had been so sure He would do, and I longed for relief from the pain. I knew I had God’s “permission” to do one thing, but I wasn’t looking for His permission, I was looking for His will. So I began praying the same thing I had prayed so many times before and asked God to clearly show me what He wanted me to do. As I walked, I imagined Jesus walking ahead of me on the sidewalk. (This wasn’t a “vision”, just me making an analogy for myself.) I imagined that I could only see His back and that He was some distance away walking briskly like He had a destination in mind. I imagined that I was following Him, and I began to think how I could do anything, follow Jesus anywhere, as long as I was sure that it was HIM I was following and that I wasn’t being deceived by Satan or by my own desires. I knew that I had no wisdom of my own, no strength of my own, but if I could just know that it was Jesus up ahead, I could face whatever the future held. I told God this over and over as I walked up and down Firestone, and I just kept picturing Him ahead of me, leading me, though I did not know where.
Nothing miraculous happened that day other than I knew I had given my decision to God. But it wasn’t long after that I became aware of some things that I felt were God confirming to me what He wanted me to do. It didn’t make sense to me, but because I knew I had given the decision to Him and that He had the power to stop me if I was misinterpreting things, I finally moved forward and made a decision. It was still the hardest, most heart-breaking decision I’ve ever had to make and the scariest, too, because it meant the future would look nothing like I’d always imagined it or the way I wanted it to be. But now I had peace because I knew I had let God make the decision, and 3 things are always true about God: 1.) He is sovereign, 2.) He is wise, and 3.) He is good.
“God in His love always WILLS what is best for us. In His wisdom, He always KNOWS what is best, and in His sovereignty He has the POWER to bring it about.”
The walk I took down Firestone that awful, gray day in May of 2020 has stuck with me. I remember the peace I had when I finally surrendered my will to God’s will and trusted Him to make the best decision for me. It’s become a touchstone that I keep coming back to. That’s where I want to stay in my life- following Jesus down Firestone Avenue, saying “I can go anywhere You lead as long as I know it’s YOU I’m following and not my own wisdom.” I’m not saying I’m perfectly consistent in doing that, far from it—I’m just saying that’s my goal. I don’t have any wisdom of my own. I’m not “good”. I’m not “strong”. I’m just a regular person. I’m a sinner. But God has promised to supply all my needs “according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus”. I can either believe that promise and take comfort from it, or I can doubt it and live in uncertainty.
I won’t say that letting God make that decision has resulted in a complete absence of sorrow. There have been many times during the last 18 months when I’ve been overwhelmed with grief over what I’ve lost and what could have been. But I have learned that God’s grace IS sufficient. And I have learned that you can experience sorrow AND joy/peace/hope at the same time when God is the source of your joy/peace/hope. I’m still sad sometimes when I think about what’s happened, but I can honestly say that I am not sad all the time or even sad most of the time anymore. In fact, because God enabled me to go TO Him with my pain instead of blaming Him for it, He has used this trial to show me more clearly who He is, and NOTHING is more enjoyable than God. This may sound strange, but if I could go back and "undo" the bad things that have happened to me the last 3-4 years and make them not happen, but it would mean giving up what I've learned about God, I can truthfully say that I wouldn't do it. That would not be a good trade.
“I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” Philippians 3:8