Decision-Making, Wisdom & Calling, and the G.I. Effects of Lunch

Today I spent almost all day meeting with seniors. With approximately 105 days until graduation, of course everyone is thinking and talking and praying about what to do next.

Several of the students were stuck in a place that is peculiar to Christians: they had options and ideas for the future that made total sense...but they weren't sure if something making sense was "spiritual" enough, or if their thoughts were God's will for them or just their own ideas of what they wanted.

I think that there's a couple principles that operate when it comes to godly, biblical decision-making.

First, there's the seeking wisdom principle, outlined particularly in Proverbs.

There are wise and un-wise ways to make decisions. Learning wise processes is a critical part of establishing healthy decision-making patterns. Wise processes will as a rule lead to wise outcomes and perhaps even more importantly will bear the fruit of shaping us into wise people.

Foolish, sloppy, or poor processes will lead to a life of foolish decisions and again, more significantly, bear the fruit of foolishness in our lives.

Making a wise decision about things like the next step post-college from a biblical perspective includes some things that are commons sense: does it fit with your passions and interests? can you afford it (i.e. grad school)?

And then there are other things that are somewhat unique to the biblical process: prayer (sometimes accompanied with fasting), the moral boundaries of Scripture, and an emphatic command to have your community be a part of your process.

I think that this type of "seeking wisdom" process governs the vast majority of decisions that I've made in my life, both big and small. No angels dancing. No voices from heaven. Simple wisdom.

But there is one more step in the process: submission. At the end of what I think has been a wise process, I submit the outcome of that process to the Lord. Because sometimes God calls us to chuck wisdom in order to do something that makes absolutely no sense and does not line up with anything we've expected or considered to this point. That's God's trump card. It's called "calling."

Calling is a tricky thing, and it's experienced by different people in different ways. But calling is basically something that is communicated by God to us a in a way that is (eventually) a clear invitation to move in a specific direction.

The New Testament most often uses 'calling' in terms of our salvation. We are called to salvation. God speaks, most often through other people, to invite us into relationship with himself. But obviously it relates to decisions like career choices, marriage, and other major life decisions.

Calling cannot be put into a formula, and it can be hard to know if we're experiencing a "calling" or just the effects of this afternoon's lunch in the cafeteria. This frustrates us when we're in decision-making times. But it is a gift.

If we were given formulas, we would rely on those formulas instead of a real-time, real-life communication with our Good Father. This is why the New Testament doesn't give us formulas...and why you should immediately go and burn all "Christian" books that attempt to reduce any matters in relation to God into a formula.

So we seek wisdom. And then we submit it to the Lord in order to allow him to trump it with calling. If we earnestly engage in this process, he will not allow us to go wrong--at least not for long. His will is not a minefield, and he does not play games with his children. He loves you too much to do that.

But if we can learn to grow up into a holy process of seeking wisdom and submitting our conclusions to the Lord--that will make us into holy, grown-up people. And that is a tremendous, tremendous gift.