Discernment 4

May 31, 2022 Learning from Others

We Were Never Meant to Walk Alone

Charting a Course Alone

“You can be anything you want,” they said. “If you can dream it, you can be it,” we were told. My generation grew up believing we could follow our bliss, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and every other cliche of the American dream. We were led to believe we were the masters of our own destinies.

I remember a moment I realized we’d been fed lies. I was standing with a friend I had been close to all through high school and college. I was on a break from grad school and he had been in the workforce before heading to law school. We stood on a balcony talking about where our lives had gone since college, about to go our separate ways again. Barely into our twenties, we had weariness in our voices already. “Nothing has turned out the way I thought it would,” he said. I saw the disillusionment in his eyes that mirrored my own. We had been launched out into a world we weren’t ready for, ill-equipped to face reality, and had no one to guide us when everything went topsy-turvy. I felt so alone.

Twenty years later, I watch nieces and nephews graduate and step into the same uncertainty. I watch my eldest with dread, realizing her turn to step into the great unknown is closer than I want to think. How can we help the next generation face reality better than we did? How can we equip them to chart a course that works? I am getting tiny glimpses into the answers to those questions as I, myself, navigate my next steps.

When Our Maps No Longer Work

My personal and professional life has been fraught with life-altering decisions I have second and twenty-second guessed. Two international moves around the world and back, my husband’s mid-life career change, and a late-in-life change of church traditions for myself have left me reeling in the past few years. I’ve been asking God for assurances that I made the right decisions or to show me how to make better ones in the days ahead.

My family felt alone in making many of these massive decisions. No one in the non-profit we just left or our home church helped us figure out how to re-enter life in the United States after two years living in South Asia. Confused and alone, we reached out and felt a void reaching back for us. The map we’d been given didn’t work and we didn’t know where to turn.

Stopping to Ask for Directions

I knew God was moving me into something deeper but I didn’t know what or how to figure that out by myself. I sent out a cry for help and took steps to surround myself with people to walk beside me. I needed some fresh eyes to help me see what I couldn’t see clearly for myself...

CONTINUE READING AT THE MUDROOM

January 13, 2020 Listening to God:, The wilderness

The Winding Paths That Lead Us Home

It all seemed so clear…until it didn’t anymore. I had a vision and a plan and I believed it was all from God. As circumstances lined up, I became even more assured that it must be true.

I hear it all the time when something unexplainably good happens: “It was such a God thing.” It’s our way of saying, God ordained this; it must have been the will of the Lord. That’s why it all worked out, right?

But then, it doesn’t work out. Something that seemed so clear gets fuzzy. Dreams die. Plans change. Life smacks us around and derails what looked like a path set out for us. Wasn’t that God’s plan, too? Could our detours and our suffering be part of the perfect plan for us? We don’t like to claim that one.

I remember it like yesterday, a conversation that seemed innocent enough; not like one that would change my entire life. I had stopped by an old friend’s house to meet him for lunch. We had known each other since middle school and went to the same church as teenagers. We had reconnected in the past few weeks when we both moved back to our hometown after college. When his dad walked into the kitchen he reacted the way most people did upon hearing my plans. “What can we do to keep you from moving to India?” he said.

I raised my head with the confidence of someone following the way intended by God alone. “Nothing,” I insisted, “I am going.”

I had followed the breadcrumbs that led me to this place of kismet. I knew in my bones since college I would live in a foreign land but I wasn’t sure where. I chased that dream to seminary to get a stronger foundation under my feet before I launched out into the world.

I met a visiting lecturer who talked about his work in Northern India. He was supporting local artists who were seeing Hindus and Christians work together to create amazing art. I jumped at the opening to use my dance training and my faith together. When I started studying classical Indian dance, I became infatuated with all things Indian culture. I devoured the food, Bollywood movies, and the thumping bhangra beats.

I felt elegant in my sari the night of my first Bharata Natyam performance. My teacher said I took to the dance style so naturally I must have been a temple dancer in a past life. I found a job in which I could study dance in India and build relationships with college students in a big city. Clearly, this was a God thing.

Until…I fell quickly and madly in love with that old friend I said I was having a harmless lunch with. I weighed this perfect vision I had of what my life should look like with what also seemed like a perfect fit between the two of us. Wait, was I wrong? How could two paths be the right ones? Was India all my dream and not God’s?...

CONTINUE READING AT THE MUDROOM

March 28, 2019 Books to read, Listening to God:, Presence & Stillness, Transition

The Next Right Thing

Sometimes a book shows up in your life and you tuck away the knowledge gained from it for another day. Sometimes the words slam into your life and you feel like the author intended every last word for you and God must have ordained its writing for this very moment in time.

Maybe it’s just me that has this kind of gut connection to words sometimes, but I have a feeling it’s not. If you happen to know what I mean, then let me tell you that Emily Freeman’s The Next Right Thing: A Simple, Soulful Practice for Making Life Decisions slammed into my life that is facing major upheaval and just about a dozen massive life decisions pending. When I started listening to The Next Right Thing podcast where she talked about decision paralysis and how people face about 35,000 decisions per day, I knew I needed to read the book at this point in my life.

We are ending our current jobs and moving back to America after a year and a half in South Asia. While this is familiar territory after the move here, it is different. Saying goodbye to life there was hard but we knew what we were walking into and we were excited about the changes to come. While we know where we will be living and are thrilled to be returning to a place miles from family, we don’t know what is next for us. We are walking into the complete unknown and some days we are simply paralyzed by the largeness of the questions.

Enter Freeman’s book that is a beautiful mix of practical and inspiring. If you’re looking for someone to help you make pro and con lists and be certain you are making the wise choices, look elsewhere. If you are looking for someone to help you ask the right questions and dig deep into spiritual practices that will help you be certain you are engaging the process of discernment well, stick around Freeman’s book or podcast for a while.

I want assurance I’m doing the right thing. Instead, over and over again I am getting the assurance that I’m looking at the right person to guide me:

“What I’m finding to be most helpful more than any list, question, or sage advice is simply to get quiet in a room with Jesus on the regular, not for the sake of an answer but for the sake of love.”

I want a clear destination. I am reminded that the path, one day at a time in step with Jesus, is what matters:

“The darkness can invite us into a mystery, a place where we don’t know the answer. We know that seeds need to bury down deep in the ground, sometimes for a long, long time. Eventually, those seeds will break open and take root. But first, they have to settle into darkness. Still, that seed carries with it a narrative of hope. It just hasn’t lived into the whole story yet.”

I want action steps (you do get those in the book and I especially recommend pre-ordering before April 2 so you get free access to the Discern and Decide Video Series that will walk with you through the process of discernment) but I get prayers to breathe out when I can’t find the words anymore:

“Unbound by time or place or gravity, you go ahead of us into an unknown future. You walk toward us with love in your eyes. You stand beside us when we find ourselves in unsure places. You sit next to us in silence and in joy. You watch behind us to protect our minds from regret. You live within us and lead from a quiet place... Let us keep company with you at a walking pace, moving forward together one step at a time. Help us to know the difference between being pushed by fear and led by love.”

I’m daily clinging to this question as I try to take small steps forward: “Does this activity draw me closer to God or push me further from him?”

Yesterday the next right thing looked like listening to the friends who kept saying, “you need a buffer, time with your family as you grieve this big transition” and booking plane tickets, deciding to stop over in Europe on the way back to America. Today the next right thing looked like staying in with a book all day and letting the silence wash over me.

Friends, whatever you are facing today, this is my prayer for you: May you cling to the God who will not let you miss out on the love that is available for you, no matter what decision you make. May you accept grace from his hand and extend it to yourself and others, who are all just trying to navigate their next steps. Grace and Peace to you.

God’s Many Voices. Listening With You - A Book Review.

Someone to Walk With You to the Father

Utterly alone, you don’t believe anyone could understand the way you feel. Lost, you don’t know how you’ll ever find your way back. And then…a friend calls at just the right time. A song says the words you needed to hear. You read a line in a book that might have been taken out of your very journal. Suddenly, you know there is hope. You aren’t alone. If someone else has felt this way and found their way forward, so can you.

Liz Ditty’s book God’s Many Voices: Learning to Listen, Expectant to Hear was my friend calling to console me, the song to my heart, the “me too” moment that spoke hope into my weary soul. Though I’ve had the joy of meeting Liz, fellow Redbud Writer’s Guild member, in real life it was through the words of her book that I realized just how valuable her voice is to anyone longing to see God more clearly.

I was thrilled to support a fellow author in her book launch and get an early peek at her new book. But I mostly wanted to read it hoping it would meet me in the way I so desperately needed. I knew Liz to be dynamic speaker and spiritual director and I so longed to hear from someone like her that would walk with me to the Father I felt like I had lost touch with.

God Speaks Through So Much More Than His Word

“It’s possible to seek God’s voice but not seek God. We won’t find Him if we are moving toward our own goals and desires and trying to see Him there. God is who He is, and if we want to hear Him, we have to come to Him in our own broken desire to love Him. Listening should be an act of love, not a grasp for certainty. We have to move only toward Him and His love, not toward His wisdom or blessing or direction.” - Liz Ditty

My early life of faith was lived out in an evangelical tradition that places a heavy emphasis on hearing God through Scripture. I am so grateful for a tradition that instilled a hunger for God’s Word in me. But over the years I’ve been exposed to many other traditions—from the Episcopal church of my college years to the Coptic Church of my time in Egypt, the traditional church of South Asia to the Benedectine Monastery where I discovered the daily office, and the contemplative prayer of fellow authors and friends. I’ve learned that we have many ways of attempting to hear God and I feel like I’ve dipped my toes in the water of many disciplines but never gotten very far in actually listening through any.

In the wilderness I have found myself in after our international move, I knew God hadn’t stopped speaking and I was trying to listen. I just wasn’t hearing anything. I kept going back to the ways of my youth – read more, study more, try harder. Nothing. For nine months now a still voice has been whispering, “Listen. Just be still.”

As I read God’s Many Voices all those How is Liz in my head? moments showed me this: In all my movement and all my attempts to know the answers of why I was drowning in depression, how to get out, and what should come next—I was looking for answers, for a fix. But not for God.

The book gives you opportunities to sit with what you’ve learned and practice it in various sections, reminding you that God’s voice doesn’t just speak through Scripture. Liz focuses on God’s voice as He speaks through Scripture – yes. But also through Prayer, Community, Our Daily Lives, Coincidences and Interruptions, in Beauty All Around Us, and in Desire, Waiting, and Silence.

God’s Voice Sounds Different in Various Seasons of Life

“If you are wandering in the meantime of waiting, God is with you. He has something tender to say to you here and a profound purpose for what may seem like wasted time. The promised land will be sweet, but God is not withholding good things from you now. He has good things for you, and He is doing good things in you, right there in the wilderness of waiting.” - Liz Ditty

Maybe you are in a season where God is speaking to you more through nature or through a community. Maybe you are growing and hearing from God or perhaps you too feel a bit lost. And reading Liz’s book has reminded me that all of those places are okay. We all have seasons of listening well, of not really hearing, of silence, and of hearing God’s voice differently. It’s the ebb and flow of life and growth and, I believe, also the creativity and diversity of our God. Right now I am in am a wilderness wanderer, telling myself daily that God is with me in it and holding onto words of people like Liz who tell me He is working even when I don’t see it.

Wherever you find yourself, I know you could use a helping hand to guide you. I encourage you to pick up God’s Many Voices and keep listening. Because I believe if you do, you can expect to hear. I look forward to hearing what God has to say to you.