Post Script | October 10, 2022
You Choose
I was recently re-reading the manuscript for my forthcoming book (to pull content for some other projects), and I had an embarrassing realization. In the book, I describe my initial efforts to write a rule of life in March of 2020. I didn’t get very specific about that exercise, although I did mention I had the intention of scheduling a day of monthly prayer/planning.
Guess when that first half-day of prayer/planning happened? Last week.
Although many Christians today are unfamiliar with the concept of a rule of life (which I’ve written about here and here), I think it is incredibly valuable. There is nothing magical about writing a rule, of course. It’s not the next life-hack to solve all your problems. Rather, a rule of life is means of grace by which we pattern our lives in faithful response to God’s voice.
As human beings, we have good intentions, make lofty plans, but we don’t always make good on those intentions and plans. Sometimes we can name a good to pursue, but we can’t think of how to get there. Sometimes, even though we can see a path toward that good, we can often fail to follow it. We get busy. Laziness takes hold. And sometimes, we just realize that the good we name, while good in the generic, wasn’t reasonable for the particular shape and season of our life.
My own resistance—to scheduling one day a month of prayer/planning—wasn’t conscious. It was simply that I never moved from desire to action. I didn’t put dates on the calendar—or if I did, I gave them up when another “important” opportunity presented itself. I can schedule another day! But I didn’t. Eventually I stopped trying.
I’ve been thinking about this gap—between desire and action—a lot recently. It reminds me of the question someone asked in my church small group last week. What gets us unstuck? How are we really transformed? I don’t think there is a simple answer to that question, mostly because the ways of wisdom are slow and deliberate. The Christian life, as Eugene Peterson put it, is a long obedience in the same direction. Psalm 1 reminds us that to we are growing at the pace of trees.
Yet here is something that’s helping me recently, something that became even clearer to me when I finally took my half-day of prayer and planning. I was rereading Psalm 25, a psalm that had been important for me last fall as we were beginning to consider a move back to the United States. Suddenly, I could see in one verse some of the things I was starting to put together:
“Who is the man who fears the LORD? Him will he instruct in the way that he should choose,” Ps. 25:12
How we mind the gaps of our own transformation? First, transformation begins with a posture. It’s the fear of the Lord. We cannot live faithfully in response to God’s voice unless we begin here: in humility, in repentance, in surrendered trust, in praise and worship. That’s why a rule of life is intended for one purpose alone: to live in faithful response to God’s voice.
In addition to this posture of heart, we also need a practice of wise living. God instructs those who belong to him. What we know from wisdom themes in the Bible is that instruction suggests study and learning and submission to an authority greater than your own. Wisdom literature reminds us that the fear of the Lord is the first principle of wisdom. When our hearts are postured rightly toward God, an intentional life patterning then follows. We practice the life of the disciple. This doesn’t just mean simply reserving morning “quiet time” for Jesus but patterning every hour and day and year in order that we might be transformed into the image of Christ. We enter an apprenticeship, take up a regimen of repeated (individual and communal) practices. And what happens, year over year, is that new “ruts” of thinking and being and hoping and loving are formed in us. We start to live a new story, pledge allegiance to a new kingdom, and inhabit our identity as God’s dearly beloved children.
But this isn’t the end. No. Patterning our lives for the purpose of living in faithful response to God’s voice (whom we fear) then leads us to the great and terrifying freedom of choice. Assuming we have obeyed the explicit commands God has revealed in Scripture, we are then invited to exercise the prerogative to make decisions about everything else.
What I’m learning in life is that God, who is committed to our wisdom and holiness, is not going to choose for us. To be sure, sometimes there is such clear divine guidance that the choice is clear. (Hello, moving back to the United States!) But often, we aren’t rescued from our own freedom to choose. Please don’t forget that choosing is not the first thing. Remember, posture, then practice, then prerogative. We can only wisely choose when we fear the Lord and submit to his instruction.
This is how I tend to think of a rule of life: it’s the training to become the kind of person who knows God’s ways and follows God’s paths, mirroring the One who came because he delighted to choose God’s will. It’s an exercise for the one who wishes to choose the one necessary thing (Luke 10:42): “One thing is necessary,” Jesus said. “Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken from her.”
And on the subject of choosing, don’t forget that when you pre-order my next book, In Good Time, you’re invited to join a community of people learning to write their own rule of life. Learn more here!
P.S. I've recorded a 15-minute talk for the upcoming Breaking Free from Stress, Worry, and Anxiety Summit, hosted by Holley Gerth. You can register for the summit for FREE or upgrade to a paid registration to get lots of goodies. More info here!