Know What You Know

One rule for making decisions

It seems to be a wonderful—if also slightly terrifying—season of choosing for our family. We have our youngest sons (juniors in high school) choosing colleges. We have our oldest two children (and one son-in-law) applying to graduate schools. Even Ryan and I have recently enjoyed some vocational choosing of our own despite that we’re all grown up.

Last year, with its two graduations and a wedding, was a celebratory year. This year, with its myriad decisions, is quickly becoming a choosing year.

On the one hand, having a choice is an immense privilege. How many suffer today for the lives they can’t alter or change? The working poor. The refugee. The chronically ill. I never want to take for granted the discretionary freedom I enjoy because I know choice is not equitably distributed.

On the other hand, there are burdens inherent to choice. How do we choose wisely and well? Time and energy are spent weighing options, and we’re often exhausted by our freedoms. What’s more, near-infinite options don’t always produce the happiness we imagine they will. A book I read many years ago argued for the paradox of choice, that the more alternatives one considers, the less satisfied one is about one’s ultimate choice.

If you’re like me, the first question you ask, as you face a decision, is choosing between right and wrong. This is not a bad question and certainly one that attunes you, in one sense, to obedient faith to Jesus. Yes, Lord: let me choose only that which pleases you. But the question of right and wrong quickly meets some limits. The world doesn’t always neatly divide into clean halves of thou shall and thou shalt not. How do we choose between the competing goods of life? How do we reconcile ourselves to the compromising that is choosing?

To choose one good is often to sacrifice another.

I think a personal rule of life practice is about building a prayerful framework for choosing in this life, and I thought I’d quickly run through the five steps I’ve offered in my rule of life workshops, specifically focusing a little bit more on the last step.

Step One, as I teach it in my workshops, is this: You can’t choose well if you don’t sustain the practice of keeping company with God. Being with God means apprenticing ourselves to his wisdom and growing in Spirit-filled capacities to not simply make decisions but sustain commitments.

Step Two: Beyond established habits of prayer, Scripture, corporate worship, we can’t choose well if we don’t reckon honestly with the given conditions and constraints of our lives. There’s nothing wise about choosing for a “generic” life—and ignoring the specifics of our own. We all choose within a particular context, and that context informs our choices.

Step Three: We examine your desires, as Jesus often asked of others. What do you want? What are you seeking? We must grapple honestly with our desires and the invitations they pose. Those invitations might be: to risk, to repent, to try, to persevere, to abandon, to attempt. Your desires inform your choices, for good and for ill.

Step Four: We can’t simply think about each discrete choice at hand. This is exhausting. Instead, we might consider pre-commitments to certain habits and practices that order our lives in more intentionally obedient ways to Jesus. As we constrain our life to a regularly ordered pattern of loving God, loving neighbor, and properly loving the self, other choices are made easier when priorities have already been established.

Step Five: Finally, the habit of wise choosing requires that we regularly reflect. We need to look back on past choosing and consider what it has to teach us. Sometimes this simply means: know what you already know. I’ve been thinking about what I already know in relationship to some decisions ahead for me, and I thought of something I’ve been recently learning in 1 Samuel. It’s this:

God can save with many, and God can save with few. God can even save with one having no sword.

This reminds me to not measure the potential success or failure of a project or plan according to worldly logic. God will do what he wants to do, and he will often do it through weak people and what seem to be insufficient resources. I can deeply trust him.

What do you know that you know? I’d love to know.