Every Option Has a Disaster in It

There are two ways forward and she has been standing between them since about February.

If she takes it, she moves. That means the house, and the school, and her mother forty minutes further away, and a job that might be exactly what she has wanted or might be a room full of people who already know each other.

If she does not take it, she stays. That means another eleven months of the thing that has been slowly grinding her down, and the quiet certainty that she was offered a door and did not walk through it, and the particular flavour of regret that has no end date on it.

She has made a list. She has made the list four times, and the fourth one is in a notes app and she has stopped opening it.

She has asked five people. Three said go and two said stay and every single one of them said only you can decide, which is true and which is also the least useful sentence in the language when you are here.

She wakes at night and runs the branches. Move, and it goes wrong. Stay, and it goes wrong differently. Both films are vivid and both are convincing and she can build either one in about forty seconds.

And here is the thing she has not looked at directly. It has been six months. The deadline is not officially past but it is going. Not choosing has been doing work all this time, and it has been doing the work of choosing to stay, and nobody has ever called it that out loud.

That is you, and the not deciding is the decision.

Three things I am not going to do

I am not going to tell you which one to take. I do not know your situation, and anybody on the internet who tells you confidently what to do with a life they have not seen is selling something.

I am not going to tell you that if you were listening properly God would have made it obvious by now. That teaching has kept an enormous number of thoughtful people frozen for years. There are decisions where God gives a clear leading and there are decisions where He hands you two lawful roads and lets you pick, and the second kind is far more common than anybody admits. I have no authority to say that by myself. Scripture carries it in Proverbs 3:5-6, and the Holy Spirit carries it to you.

And I am not going to tell you the fear is silly. It is not. Both options genuinely do carry real losses, and you are not inventing them, and this is not a case of a small choice being blown up.

You are not being punished with silence for a failure to listen. Scripture says if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not, James 1:5, and upbraideth not is in the verse specifically for people who have asked more than once, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives without ever making somebody feel slow for needing to ask.

The verse is about the walking, not the map

There is a pair of lines in Proverbs that everybody has heard and almost nobody reads carefully.

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.Proverbs 3:5-6

Look at the tense of the last clause, because it is the whole thing.

He shall direct thy paths. Direct is a word about steering something that is moving. You cannot steer a stationary car. The promise is attached to thy ways, to a life in motion, and it describes God adjusting a course rather than handing over a map in advance.

That is not what you have been waiting for. You have been waiting for the map: for certainty before movement, for a guarantee that the option you pick will not have a disaster in it. That is Scripture's sentence and not mine, Proverbs 3:5-6, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who makes it true where you are.

He did not promise that, and He has not withheld it from you as a punishment. He promised something better and more frightening, which is that He will be steering while you go.

And notice lean not unto thine own understanding. That is not an instruction to stop thinking. It is an instruction to stop resting your whole weight on your ability to foresee outcomes, which is exactly what six months of running branches at three in the morning has been.

You are not going to be steered while stationary. Scripture says in all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths, Proverbs 3:6, and the directing is promised to a person in motion, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the correcting on a road rather than in a car park.

What the branches are actually for

The three in the morning films feel like preparation. They are not.

If they were preparation they would produce a decision. Six months of them has produced no decision, which tells you what they are actually doing: they are giving you the feeling of working on the problem while keeping you completely still.

And there is something else in them worth seeing. Both films are disasters. You have never once, in six months, run the version where you move and it is difficult for four months and then it is good. You have never run the version where you stay and it is disappointing and then something else opens. Scripture stands under that in Proverbs 3:5-6, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

Your imagination has been generating only catastrophes, and you have been treating its output as forecasting. It is written, in Proverbs 3:5-6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

That is not wisdom and it is not discernment. It is a threat detection system with the volume up, doing what it does, and it will keep doing it for another six months if you let it.

You are not required to trust a machine that only produces one kind of picture. Scripture says God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind, 2 Timothy 1:7, and a mind producing nothing but catastrophes is not the sound one being described, and the Holy Spirit is not the author of a film that always ends badly.

The thing nobody says about a wrong decision

Here is what has you frozen, and it is worth putting into daylight.

You believe one of these is right and one is wrong, and that choosing wrong is a thing that cannot be recovered from.

Almost nothing in an ordinary life is like that. Most decisions of this kind are not right and wrong; they are two different roads with different costs, and both are survivable, and people move back, change jobs, and revise things all the time without anything ending.

And this matters theologically as well as practically. God's ability to work with your life is not contingent on your picking the correct door. He has been working with people who chose badly, on purpose, since the beginning, and the book is full of them and He is not defeated by any of it.

You are not one bad decision away from being outside what God can do. Scripture says all things work together for good to them that love God, Romans 8:28, and all things was written wide enough to include the wrong turnings, and the Holy Spirit is not standing at a junction waiting to see whether you deserve His help.