How Do We Know What God Wants Us To Do?

If you're like me, making big life decisions can be very overwhelming. And by big life decisions, I mean stuff like choosing a career path, choosing which school to attend, choosing what to put in my burrito at Chipotle. You know, the serious stuff. I remember standing at the order screen in Sheetz one time (that's a fancy gas station like WaWa or whatever for you non-East Coast people) and I could have stood there for twenty minutes staring at all of the options for my sandwich, the meat, cheese, toppings, bread type. It was honestly ridiculous how many little choices went into this one minuscule decision in my life-the decision to pick up breakfast at the gas station (it's a lot classier than it sounds, I swear).

If I can't even pick out a sandwich without feeling overwhelmed, how in the world will I make decisions that actually matter? I can't tell you the amount of time I have spent stressing over a life choice and wondering if it was really what God wanted me to do.

Over two years ago I wrote a post about this picture:

This is a picture of me on the beach in the Dominican, at the exact moment I felt confirmed once and for all that God was calling me to the DR. I'm still thankful to my friend Ben for documenting this occasion without knowing how significant it was for me. After that time at the ocean I never turned back; I knew this was God's plan.

Isn't that a cute story? Here's the deeper truth behind this split-second snapshot of my life: before I became completely sure, I wrestled with myself and with God for two years about whether this was the right choice. Two. Whole. Years. Sure, I was young and wasn't planning on leaving the country that soon anyway, but two years of praying and debating? Now that I'm older and wiser (kind of), that amount of time seems a bit excessive.

Why was I so hesitant to make a firm decision and stick with it? That's an easy one: it's because I was too afraid of making the wrong choice and screwing up God's plan for my life. Though in my head this seems crazy, in my heart I felt like if I didn't follow the exact blueprint God clearly had written out for me from before the beginning of time, I would ruin things for the rest of my life and always live in some second-best plan B that God filed away in case I messed up. Obviously you can see why I was so stressed. That's a lot of pressure to put on yourself. 

And it's completely unnecessary pressure too. The more I got to know God the more I realized that he isn't some puppet master moving us along these previously marked paths that show us where to go and what to do until the day we die. He has a great overall plan for humanity, one that has nothing to do with which country I live in and everything to do with redeeming us as a society and as individuals. If he had wanted to control our every move he wouldn't have gifted us with the freedom of choice, the freedom to have a will of our own. 

Why in the world did God do that? Why did he allow us to make our own decisions, and with that our own mistakes? 

God loves us. That's all there is to it. He loves us and wanted to live life with us, not by controlling us.

The story of Saul becoming king of Israel in 1 Samuel has changed my life and how I make decisions, and it's one of my favorite stories to talk about. God tells Samuel to anoint Saul as the first king of Israel. After anointing him Samuel at first gives Saul very specific instructions on what to do, like accepting bread from three random strangers, and joining a group of prophets with lyres and tambourines. Apparently the procession of prophets with tambourines was non-negotiable. He tells him that after all these signs the Spirit of the Lord will be upon him. But this is what Samuel tells him next in 1 Samuel 10:7: "...do whatever your hand finds to do, for God is with you."

Do...whatever? That's the first great mandate for the new king of Israel? To do whatever? If I were God and I had just chosen a little human to rule over my people, I would want to control his every move. I would want him to be merely a mouthpiece to keep on doing what I wanted to do. But God doesn't do that. He allows Saul to make his own choices as king. 

Obviously there were times in Saul's life where God did give him specific tasks to do, and I will talk about that in another post. But Saul was wise, and he followed God's commandments (at least in the beginning) and God trusted him to use the gifts he had been given to rule his kingdom well. 

God does the same thing with us. God is with us, and so we should do, well, whatever we find to do, because if we are following God and sharing his love with others, we honestly can't go wrong. As I said before, God is orchestrating a beautiful plan, weaving a single shared story through all of human history. And he's not doing that in spite of our free will choices, but rather through those choices. To think that we humans can somehow mess up or hinder God's plan by making a "wrong" choice is an insult to his omnipotence. God is more than capable of knitting all of our individual decisions together to make one perfect redemption story. So stop stressing! He will use you wherever you choose to go.

I feel I need to say at this point that the decisions I'm talking about do not refer to the decision to sin or not to sin. In those situations there is always a clear right and a clear wrong. The circumstances I mean are choices like which job offer to accept, or which small group to join. If you don't have a very clear direction after praying and seeking God's counsel, then use your best judgment and use the wisdom God has already given you to make a decision. 

Let me give an example. During college I had to do an international internship. The organization I was working through gave me a choice: I could work in Honduras with high-schoolers, or I could work in Kenya at a baby hospital. Two very different countries, two very different ministries. I thought and prayed about both, but didn't feel strongly for one over the other. Both seemed like great opportunities. I am so glad I ended up going where I did, but I also know that God would have used me in either ministry, and I would have learned and grown from either experience. There was no wrong choice in this scenario. I didn't stress out about it, and I had an amazing summer and formed relationships that are still strong today. 

Are you struggling to make an important decision? Do you feel like God's not talking to you or leading you to a specific place or task? Give yourself some credit and exercise that freedom God gave you. He can and will use you wherever you go; the only thing he asks is that you go. Do whatever your hand finds to do, because God really is with you.  

Go get 'em!

Love the Foreigner: A Message From an Outsider

If you came here expecting to see an opinionated article about refugees or immigrants and what we should do with them, then you've clicked on the wrong link. This is not an argument for a certain side, or a social commentary on a hot issue. This is simply my story, and the simple truth I think we can take from it.

After almost two years in the Dominican Republic I feel that I have some experience as a foreigner, a non-native; because of this, I would like to speak on behalf of outsiders in our own country. We all have interacted with people who are not native to the United States. Sometimes those experiences are wonderful, informative, and mutually beneficial. Other times it can seem frustrating and confusing. Maybe it's someone who doesn't know English very well, or someone who doesn't understand how to order a sandwich at Subway. Maybe their customs or lifestyle make us uncomfortable at times. Either way, we've all been there, right?

But we all haven't been in the other person's shoes. Not everyone has experienced the role of the foreigner or has been in a place where things make sense to everybody but themselves. I have. And believe me, it's not easy. Being the outsider in another country has made me extra aware of the foreigners in my own country. Not that I have ever been disrespectful or rude to anyone, but now that I understand more of what they are experiencing I feel more compelled to be helpful to them if they ever need assistance.

I studied Spanish for five years before I even moved to the DR. I have a B.A. in Spanish and Missions, and I made eight short-term trips to my new country before I made the permanent move. I was well-informed and suitably equipped. Do you know how often I needed assistance from locals?

Daily.

No matter how much you think you know, nothing can truly prepare you for total immersion in a new culture. There are nuances and quirks that take a lifetime to master. There are things locals do that they don't consciously think about until they see an outsider acting differently. No matter how integrated into the community I was, I would always, always be different.

Being different is stressful and exhausting. You have to work twice as hard as everyone else just to appear "normal" in that society. Some people are happy to help when you screw up or don't know what to do. Others are not so helpful.

Do you want to know my most stressful experience during my entire time in the DR? It wasn't the first day I moved when we were stuck at the airport overnight and didn't know whether or not anyone was coming to pick us up. It wasn't the first time I crossed the Haitian border and my family and I were the only people that had to exit the bus and go to the immigration office to talk about a problem. It wasn't even when I moved into a batey alone and couldn't sleep my first night because I was so lonely and nervous. No, it was worse than all of those experiences put together.

It was when I had to order checks at the bank.

I know, I know. It sounds ridiculous, and actually it probably is. I had been in the country for about two months; my Spanish was very good, but I still struggled with the Dominican accent at times, especially when I had to hold a conversation over the phone without facial cues.

Ordering checks in the States is easy. All you have to do is go into the bank and ask for checks and they will send them to you. You can even order them online and they are delivered right to your door without ever having to speak to another human! In the Dominican it's different. When we opened up a new account for our ministry, it took a few weeks for our checks to come in, and when they finally did I had to sit in the bank, call a phone number, answer a lot of questions, list off my account number, and then finally be approved. I didn't know any of this until the lady at the bank handed me my checkbook, highlighted my account number, and passed me her phone to complete the process myself. Right there in Banco Popular, in front of dozens of customers and bank employees as my witnesses, I began the most humiliating phone call I've ever made.

The lady on the phone was nice enough, but she was speaking very quickly and asking me questions I couldn't understand and didn't know how to answer properly. The more flustered I became, the less Spanish I could recall in my mind to respond to her. I struggled through a few questions before I finally gave up, thrusting the phone back into the woman's hands and telling her I didn't understand what to do. She listened to the lady on the phone for a few seconds before handing the phone back to me, saying curtly that she couldn't do this for me, that I had to do it myself. Maybe it was in my mind, but her face held an expression of impatience and a little disdain for having to deal with an incompetent person like me. My face was burning with shame and I felt sure that everyone in the vicinity was listening to me, judging me. I gripped the phone hard to quell my shaking hand, gulped back some tears threatening to surface, and slowly began the process again. I'm sure it took much less time than it seemed, and finally we walked out of the bank successfully, checks in hand, while I continued to fight back tears the entire ride home.

Maybe that doesn't seem like a big deal to people, but for me it was embarrassing and stressful. It was a glaring reminder that I didn't belong. If I couldn't even do simple things like complete transactions at the bank, how was I ever supposed to fit in here? I was ashamed of myself for not being better and felt demeaned and condescended by the bank employee who didn't offer me help when I so desperately needed it, choosing instead to glare at me for not knowing better. It took a lot of determination to walk into that bank again with my head held high, ready to try again for a smoother experience.

Because I know what it feels like to be lost in the sea of foreign procedures and customs, I now have even more respect for people who travel to our country to start a new life in a new culture. It's incredibly overwhelming, and it takes a large amount of strength and will.

I have other memories of times in which I've struggled to figure things out, but they are better memories. The task might have been just as daunting as ordering checks, maybe even more daunting, but the experience was positive because of one difference:

People were willing to help me.

People pointed me in the right direction; they patiently explained certain processes and how to go about things; they stayed with me until they knew I was going to be OK. I remember one time in a hardware store-usually where I needed the most help and the most patience from others-I needed to buy some materials for someone but I didn't know what they were called in Spanish or even how to go about ordering them. The hardware store employee could clearly see how lost I was, and he worked with us for fifteen minutes without moving on to another customer (which is rare in the DR). He spoke slow enough for me to understand without belittling me, and he asked simple questions to clarify what I needed. When we had gathered all the supplies he led me to the cashier because he knew I didn't know where it was. After we paid, the employee helped carry the supplies to our truck. I thanked him, he smiled genuinely, and we parted ways.

That man didn't have to be so accommodating. He didn't have to work with me through the entire transaction. He could have passed me along to another employee or left me to fend for myself. But he chose to stay, and I will remember his kindness.

This is not a rare story, by the way. I could tell you of countless experiences where people went out of their way to assist me or make me feel welcome in their community. I could tell you about employees who would point to me and ask for my order because they saw people were cutting in front of me in line. Or I could tell you about a young woman who took the time to tell me the names of all the chicken parts for sale so I would know what to order (I now forget all of them, but it was a nice gesture).

The kids who stopped what they were doing to take me to my destination because I was completely turned around. The friends who held my hand while crossing the road because they were afraid I would walk into traffic. The ladies who cooked meals for me because I didn't know how to make Dominican food. The men who spent their weekends digging holes in a field to put up soccer goals because my team wanted to play and I didn't know how to set up a game. All of those people contributed to making my time as a foreigner so wonderful. I wish I could repay them, but the best thing I can do now is to remember what they did for me and in turn be that welcoming person for someone else.

God spends a fair amount of time in the Bible talking about foreigners and how we should treat them. "He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing. And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt." (Deuteronomy 10:18-19) Aliens, or outsiders, immigrants, etc. were consistently mentioned in the Old Testament alongside orphans and widows, who were considered to be the people in society who needed to be helped and looked after the most. God cares for the weary traveler who is lost in a new land. And he wants us to care too.

Let us love those who are aliens. Let us do what we can to make their transition easier. There were people who did the same for me, and they would do they same for you as well. What a great privilege it is to welcome outsiders and help them become our neighbors.