Are You Trying to See the Future?
(It's probably not working...)
Discernment is hard sometimes. We want to make good decisions but sometimes feel like we’re doing so blindly, stepping out into open space and feeling absolutely nothing.
I wanted to share a quote I found on discernment, because it really spoke to me about the truth of this spiritual art.
“The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise.”1
If you ever find yourself praying to know the future in discernment, and feel like God isn’t sharing it with you, it’s probably because He’s not. Discernment is not the Christian equivalent of crystal-ball gazing (although many of us treat it like it is at times.)
God acts in the present moment because that is where we live.
The next step (not the next 5 or 10 or 25) emerges out of now.
But sometimes, the present moment can feel like a desert.
The desert feels dry. The desert feels empty. The desert feels scary and boring and pointless.
The desert is sometimes where we’re called to be.
The desert requires trust: trust that somehow, in the aridity, the emptiness, in the fear and boredom and lack of direction, God will be with us.
He’s with us in the small, daily things. Giving up chocolate or social media or whatever small thing we might be trying? It leads us to trust that when we’d usually turn to the snack drawer or the smart phone for comfort, we can turn to God instead. He will be enough. He is enough.
Let’s try to live in the desert of the present moment, the place where God wants to meet us.
Let’s try to trust that since He is with us now, He will be with us then, in that future we’re trying to see.
Let’s try to practice discernment from this present moment of trust.
The next step we’re looking for doesn’t exist in the future: it will be revealed here, where are, with God.
(from Brennan Manning’s Ruthless Trust, which I have not read, via this volume of Shawn Smucker’s newsletter, which is a beautiful reflection on living a life of trust!)