You’ve just made a major move, one you believe served the Lord’s interests while also having potential spiritual benefits for your family and other relationships. It wasn’t even a hard choice. Work opportunities had dried up locally and you’re too young to retire. All the churches where you lived are dead, dying, or riddled with theological peculiarities. Godly friends suggested a change of location might be the answer. Less-godly friends said you were crazy to leave. More local job opportunities fell through.
Then your landlady mentioned she wants to do a major reno on your apartment, an invasive process that might take weeks or months to complete. It was time. So you took a risk with a job opportunity several hundred miles away, packed up the car and found yourself a new place to unload your furniture, such as it is.
That was kind of exciting, at least initially. Then things started going wrong. Not one thing. Pretty much everything. Financially, jobwise, roommate-wise, endless car repairs — you name it. The string of disasters is so epic and so improbable that their origin can only be spiritual in nature.
What kind of thoughts are going through your head now?
Directional Signposts
The unexpected happened to my father more than once in seventy-plus years of serving the Lord. Technically, it happened to Mom too, but as an itinerant Bible teacher moving to a new city and looking to make regular use of his spiritual gifts for the benefit of the local church, he was registering the impact of a decision that wasn’t working out face-forward 24/7. Mom got it second-hand, for the most part. It was enough, he told me later, to make him seriously question whether he’d somehow managed to step out of the Lord’s will.
I never thought that likely, though I observed with an eldest son’s curiosity the way Dad went about making decisions about matters that had no obvious moral component. It’s my experience that finding the Lord’s will in matters of right and wrong is a breeze compared to changing cities, jobs, schools or churches, decisions that have major effects on your life but for which only instinct, experience and circumstances generally serve as directional signposts.
Moral and ‘Neutral’
In moral matters, between the word of God, the Spirit of God indwelling you, and a conscience sharpened by daily fellowship with the Lord, something will set off a fire alarm when you take a step in the wrong direction. If it doesn’t, it ought to. I do not believe our Lord deliberately makes knowledge of his will obscure about decisions that will affect our fellowship with him.
These seemingly neutral life changes, on the other hand, can be a bear. If it’s true that we have been given genuine Divine agency, this is something we ought to expect. Sometimes the Lord will let us use our best judgment and then let us see how that plays out. The older believers I’ve talked to about the major choices they made along the way give similar testimony: that there are no easy answers, that they too experienced doubts when things suddenly went wrong, that the circumstantial will of God — assuming such a thing even exists — can only be understood looking in the rear view mirror, etc.
Writing’s on the Wall
That’s all well and good — unless you’re looking through a windshield coated with ice inside a previously reliable vehicle that appears to have broken down for the third time in five weeks. The good news, if you can call it that, is that you don’t need the car for work at least: the company that gave you a contract unilaterally rescinded it after less than a week because they are going through a slow period, and you haven’t seen a paycheck in almost a month.
I don’t know about you, but that’s usually the moment I start getting a tiny bit more superstitious than usual. It’s tempting to ask, “What did I do?” even when no amount of soul-searching and spiritual temperature-taking reveal that trail of breadcrumbs you hope will lead you out of the woods. The answer, I believe, is probably “Nothing.”
Apostolic Leading
For the record, the history of the apostles in such matters is almost as dodgy as yours. Romans 15, which by no coincidence I read this morning, records Paul’s attempts to arrange his own itinerary, which, as he mentions, were “often hindered”. This was a man to whom the Holy Spirit gave unmistakable circumstantial direction at times, yet who also experienced numerous periods during which the Lord allowed him to make unaided decisions about how to proceed using his own judgment. Accordingly, he planned and executed with something considerably less than perfect prescience.
Twice in Romans he mentions a plan to go to Spain. There is no scriptural evidence this ever happened, though there are church traditions that suggest it did. If it did, it certainly did not occur when Paul originally planned it. Likewise, the circumstances under which Paul visited Rome were quite different than those he envisioned when he wrote his letter to the church there. Perhaps all the saints he originally hoped to see visited him in prison. We are never told.
No Cause for Alarm
Despite the uncertainty such passages convey, they are not alarming to read provided we believe that “working
together with him” is a normal part of the Christian life. To be a
In a world without agency, we could hardly do otherwise.
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