A central focus in the Christian journey is growing in maturity to a place where we can joyfully pray, “Not my will, but yours be done.” There are two difficulties with getting to this place. The first is that we often don’t want to do the Lord’s will, because it means we have to give up on getting our own way. This can be very painful, but in our prayer life it is a fairly straightforward obstacle to face. We must surrender and trust. That’s the only way forward.
The second difficulty is harder to face. It emerges after we have begun in earnest to surrender our life to God and trust his guidance and provision. As we do this we discover a greater challenge in yielding to the Lord’s will. We often don’t know what it is.
The spiritual journey would be much simpler if every decision were binary, good vs. evil, my way vs. God’s way; but these aren’t the kinds of decisions we really wrestle over in prayerful discernment. Decisions about relationships, finances, calling, limits, and family are nuanced and they feel anything but binary.
Following God’s will in these areas often feels like trying to find safe passage through a forest without any beaten down paths in the middle of a foggy night. We need a guide, because we don’t know the way. The Lord loves to be our guide, but unfortunately, to our spiritual senses, it’s as if it’s very dark out. All we can do is feel for the Lord’s presence beside us and do our best to stay near to him. We trust that he must know the way even when we don’t know where we are going.
This means our discernment is less about figuring out the way to go and much more about paying attention to what his presence feels like. It’s not really about analyzing the topography of the forest or trying to get up high on a hill to see far into the distance. Discernment increasingly boils down to feeling our way forward with an orientation towards presence.
A friend of mine summed up discernment as “practicing a preference for the presence of God.” This feels right to me. As we grow in maturity, following God’s will becomes less about analysis, pros vs cons, and vision-casting, and more about feeling our way forward towards presence. Yielding to God’s will is ultimately an act of faith in the face of much uncertainty. We likely aren’t sure where we are going or how things will turn out. We simply believe that the way that feels like presence is God’s will.
If you are standing at a crossroads, how might the question: “Which way feels more like Jesus’s presence?” guide you in your discernment?
*Photo by HAMZA-CHERIF Elias on Unsplash
