Decisions: Stop Yelling at Your GPS

“Stop Yelling At Your GPS”

A message from the 1 Corinthians 2:6-16 by Don Heatley from Vision Community Church 2/15/09

As Prince once said, “dig, if you will, a picture.”  Imagine riding in the passenger seat of a friend’s  brand new SUV on your way to a concert.  It’s the kind of high-tech vehicle in which you can give verbal commands to the sound system and it plays the file you want.  Each passenger can listen to a different radio station, maybe even watch a different DVD.  There are cup holders, storage compartments and power outlets everywhere.  Most importantly, your friend’s new vehicle has a navigation system.  She has entered your destination into the system and periodically a lovely female voice chimes into your conversation, “Turn left on Highway 211 in 500 ft.”  Or “prepare to bear left in .8 miles.”  Nothing unusual, just an everyday event.

Now imagine that every time the computer voice speaks, your friend talks back to it.  Not a simple thank you, but actually argues with the computer.  During the silence before each command, she says things like, “I hope the next instruction is to turn left.  Please say turn left.  Please make my destination be on the left.”   A few moments later, the navigation system responds, “Turn right.”  Your friend is angry and complains, “Why?  Why turn right?  I wished for a left turn and you didn’t grant my wish!  I wanted a left turn!”

It sounds absurd.  Why would anyone do such a thing?  Yet the scenario I just described is an accurate depiction of our prayer lives.  For many of us, prayers are wish lists of things we would like to see occur.  Not listening for God’s guidance, we think that by informing God of things we would like to see happen, God will somehow make them occur.  If we really want something to happen, we “pray harder,” which we’re not even sure what that is but we’re pretty sure it involves squinting really hard.

Certainly, God desires for us to bring our concerns and wants to God in prayer.  However, if we limit our experience of prayer to just petitions, we miss the richness of a full prayer life. Prayer is something we think we should do, because after all, that’s what Christians do.   Ironically, we aren’t even sure how to do it.  When faced with a decision, we say we will “pray about it” with no clue as what that means or what it would look like. It just seems like something a spiritual person should say.  Since we have been exploring how to make decisions, let’s take a look at how we can pray about our decisions.

A few weeks ago we saw how the wisdom of Christians who came before us can guide us in our journey.  When it comes to prayerful decisions, Ignatius of Loyala has much to teach us.  Ignatius founded the Society of Jesus in the 16th Century.  Today we commonly call them the Jesuits.  Integral to joining the order of Jesuits was going through the Spiritual Exercises.  This was a thirty-day program of prayers, meditations and mental exercises that helped one discern God’s vocation for their life.  Although it was originally used to discern whether or not to become a Jesuit, over the centuries it has been revised and shortened to make it a valuable tool in any decision-making process.  We won’t be able to cover this process in great detail this morning, so I will just give you an overview.  I will post a link to a more detailed description on my blog.   Here are some elements that different people have extracted over the years.

When is the last time you or your family did nothing, even for an hour?  We have reached a point where we schedule every minute of every day.  Think about it.  This preoccupation with prearranged business extends even to our children.  As children, most of us just walked over to a friend’s house to play.  Now we schedule play dates for them.  We plan even our adult lives down to the last detail.  Our movements are dictated by the reminder alarm on our Blackberries.

When we need to make a decision, we even schedule times to examine our options. When diagnosed with a disease we carve out hours from our schedule to spend time on the internet researching our condition.  Usually we come away believing we have every disease we just read about.  If we are thinking about moving or going away to school, we make the time to visit those places.  These are all smart things to do.

However, when we face these decisions, do we carve out any time from our daily schedule for prayer?  Do we intentionally take time to discover what God thinks about our choices?  It may seem obvious, but if you want to bring God into your decision-making process, you must first bring God into your decision-making process.  So pick a regular time every day for time with God.  Commit to it.   Stick with it. Follow through with it.  Otherwise, everything that follows will be useless.

When I first went into ministry a wise person told me that when in doubt, trust the Holy Spirit and your gut, because they are usually the same thing.  In order to trust your gut, you must first make sure your gut is in the right place, that your gut has the right appetites.  Therefore our prayer must begin by placing ourselves in the presence of God.  Perhaps the best words with which to begin our prayers are no words at all.  Let silence be your starting point.

I want to be clear here.  I am not talking about meditation in the sense of focusing on our inward self or reducing our stress level.  We approach Christian meditative practices with the expectation that we will meet someone other than ourselves.   In fact, that is the whole point.  We expect to encounter the God who is wholly other than us. In prayer, we open ourselves up to that God.

This takes practice.  Personally, I am awful at it.  Over the years I have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to practice Contemplative Prayer. I attempt to sit in silence and my mind races with all the obligations of the coming day.  Usually, when I try to begin my day in silence with God, the first thing that comes to my mind is something I forgot that I need to do that day.  This is normal and expected and goes away with practice.  So just be patient and let all those distractions pass.

Those pressing events in our day are just one example of our unhealthy attachments.  When we approach God in prayer, we are seeking to be set free of those attachments.  We are seeking spiritual freedom - freedom from our anxieties, our self-centeredness, our preconceived notions and prejudices.  So we ask God to work within us.  Ignatius suggested spending time in prayer reviewing the events of the last day and asking ourselves when we experienced what he called “consolations” and when we experienced “desolations.”  Where in the course of the day were we in line with God’s desires and where were we out of line with it?

The act of examining our daily life in light of God’s desires for us will expose some ugly truths about us.  It will expose our unhealthy attachments.  We may discover we are inordinately attached to our possessions, our job, where we live, or a particular relationship.  When we uncover those attachments, there is no need to feel shame or beat ourselves up over them.  Instead, just be honest with God about it and recognize it as something that is getting in the way of your decision.  Pray that God will remove the unhealthy attachments form your life.  Often you will resist giving up those unhealthy attachments.  You may resist modeling your life after what God desires.  When that happens, follow the wisdom of Ignatius.  Tell God you would like to follow God’s desires, even if at that moment you only have what he called the “desire for the desire.”  

This won’t happen all in one day.  It will take time for God to work on you and free you from those attachments. In the meantime, you need to pray for patience.  All the while, living your life aware of where God is moving in your life, changing you and freeing you.  

A counselor friend of mine told me about a patient of his who came to the office one day.  The man complained about all the stress in his life.  He fought with his kids, his wife, his boss and his co-workers.  He came to my friend because he wanted a counselor to speak to his wife and straighten her out.  “She’s always nagging me,” the man said. She was giving him a hard time over him spending his entire paycheck. 

“What did you spend it on?” my friend asked.

“Oh, I scored some coke with it,” the man replied.

 One of the first things, my friend told that person is before we deal with all this other stuff, you have to get sober.  You have to get your mind right to deal with your marriage, or your kids, or your job.

That’s what prayer does for us.  It clears our mind so we can approach our decisions with the right mind.  Many times, just exposing our unhealthy attachments and being set free from them will make which path to choose obvious.  Suppose you are contemplating a divorce.  If your time with God exposes the fact that your marital problems are stemming from your desire to sleep with someone else, the choice is clear.  Leaving your spouse to be with someone else is not acceptable to God.  That path is now closed off to you.

Suppose you are contemplating taking a new job.  Well, first of all, in this economy consider yourself blessed.  You need this job to pay for expensive car leases, buying furniture for all the empty rooms in your house that you never use, and spa treatments. However, suppose that new job will require put stress on you relationship with your spouse and children.  In your prayer time, God exposes your inordinate attachment to your unnecessary possessions.  Do you endanger your marriage to pay for vacations, interior decorating, and nice clothes?  God’s path ahead is clear.

Sometimes, even after putting ourselves in God’s presence and getting free of our attachments, the path ahead is still not clear. In those cases, Ignatius had some further suggestions.  You may want to try some of these when you feel stuck in a quagmire of indecision.

If you are facing two distinct choices and are the left-brained analytical type, take a piece of paper and make four columns.  Use two of the columns to list the advantages and disadvantages of one choice, and the other two columns to list the advantages and disadvantages.  Make sure you precede this with that time of prayer.  Prayerfully, in God’s presence, write down the pros and cons for each choice.  Make this a holy event, not a brainstorming session. Then spend some time, going over the lists and see where you feel Ignatius’ consolations and desolations.  Look over the things you write down and run them by the criteria we have been exploring the past few weeks, God’s Sources of Wisdom, the Fruits of the Spirit, and the Signs Along the Way.  Ask things like: Does this fit in with what I know of God from the Bible?  Does this accomplish more or less of God’s purposes in the world?  What events and people has God brought into my life that confirms any of these?

If you are a more right brain creative type, try this.  Again in the presence of God, imagine yourself on your deathbed, looking back at the course of your life.  Imagine looking back on this decision and how you would feel about your life if you made the one choice, and then how you would feel if you made the other.  If you’re really imaginative, picture yourself after your deathbed, standing before God and explaining your life.  How would you defend your decision before God? 

If you’re really feeling creative spend some time in prayer and then put an empty chair in front of you.  Sit across from it and talk to an imaginary person in that empty chair.  (It’s probably a good idea to do this when no one is home.)    Remember this is someone you have never met before, a stranger.  Then proceed to speak out loud to that person and give them advice.  Tell them what you think they should do with their life to bring more of God’s love into their life and those around them.  Tell them what choices they should make that would create a more God-filled life for them.  You may be surprised what you hear yourself say.  It may be advice that you would never give to yourself.  Yet take that advice you gave the imaginary person and apply it to your own situation. 

None of these are magic formulas for making decisions.  Even making a decision based on prayer does not guarantee that your decision will be easy to make or carry out.  Sometimes, you will still need to wait. In fact, that may very well be the answer God gives you - wait, or not yet.  God may not even speak to you during your prayer time.  Sometimes prayer will just prepare you for making a decision.  Sometimes, prayer is not the big game, it is the workout session.  The insight you need for making your decision may come to you later in the day, during the most mundane of activities.

Jesus said that God knows what we need before we even ask.  Paul said all things work together for good for those who love God.  Too often our prayers consist of informing God about what God already knows.  Our prayer requests tell God how we want things to turn out, with little thought given to how God wants things to turn out.  We don’t trust that God wants things to turn out for the best.   

Strangely, in the midst of telling God what we want, or feeling guilty for not telling God what we want often enough, we seldom stop to ask if God may be trying to tell us something.  We are like our imaginary friend who wishes for her GPS to dutifully spit out her own preconceived directions, and complaining when we get unexpected instructions.  Here’s the thing.  If we think we know where we are headed already, we don’t need directions.  Likewise, if we think we know what to ask God for already, we don’t need God.

I must confess, I never understood the old bumper sticker that said, “Let Go and Let God.”  But slowly, I am beginning to understand it.  When faced with a decision, a follower of Jesus seeks to be quiet, to allow God to free them of their attachments, and open up a space in our lives into which God can speak and give us direction. 

Have no fear, we have the best GPS of all.