Sometimes You Have To Make A Decision

I’ve started posting a question box on Instagram on Mondays, asking how I can pray for people in the week ahead. I love doing this. People submit the most beautiful requests, and I take the responsibility of praying for them to heart. I’ve also noticed a theme emerging from those requests: the need for clarity. 

Confession? 

Same. 

Same. 

I’ve been praying for clarity in my own life for weeks. Praying and journaling and waiting and wondering. Lots of prayer walks during lunch and in the evenings, pondering the same questions, debating the same options. Lots of asking for this sign or that sign, lots of frustration when I don’t receive said sign. During all of this journaling and praying for clarity for both myself and others, a vision of myself standing in the center of a crossroads came to mind. 

It’s one of those rural crossroads, the kind you see in movies. A dusty endless road stretches on, cutting left, right, forward, and back through cornfields that go as far as the eye can see. There is no signage, no discernable landmarks in the distance. Every direction looks the same, despite the knowledge that each road leads to something. I stand in the middle of the intersection, hands on hips, waiting for God to speak, for an angel to appear with advice, for a neon sign to descend from the heavens and say “thatta way!” 

On occasion, I start in one direction or the other. Because that’s the thing – I have options. I can go right or left or forward. Something in me says don’t go back. I know that small, still voice, and so I heed it. I don’t go back. But I do hesitate in the middle. Forward – to me – represents more of the same. Status quo. Left and right represent the unknown. Forward is easy. Forward is safe. If I go forward, there is a certain confidence there that life will carry on more or less the same. Nothing crazy, nothing extreme, just – safe and sound. It’s left and right that will shake things up, add some color, some spice, whatever metaphor you want to toss in there. 

Over these weeks of praying for clarity, the picture has slowly started to come into focus. Piece by hazy piece, God has directed my steps by asking me, at first, to wait in the middle which, for the record, is not my favorite course of action. Patience is not something I was blessed with. God showed me pretty quickly that backward isn’t the direction to go. Makes sense, right? Most of us don’t want to go backward. 

More recently, He’s shown me that forward, while an option I can take, isn’t the best option. It’s okay enough for now. I can wander forward, maybe even venture a little way down the road, but it’s not the path to commit to. I’ll somehow find myself right back in the middle of that crossroads. That leaves right or left. 

I don’t know what’s down the right path, nor do I know what’s down the left. I could continue to hang out in the middle. That’s an option. That’s a choice. It’s not the right choice though. We’re called to sow. To get out there and plant seeds, to push the plow, to do the work. It is through the work that we eventually reap what we sow. 

God wants me to choose a direction. Commit to it. And then get to work. 

I was proud of myself for coming to that conclusion. I sent a voice note to my friend Tracey who is always a willing listener and who has walked through this clarity journey with me. She reminded me she had told me this very thing a few weeks earlier. I remembered in the moment that she had, in fact, said as much. She had told me she felt God wanted me to make a choice and trust that He would support me in that choice. I guess I wasn’t quite ready to hear it. I needed to figure out the whole forward and backward thing first while hanging out in the middle. 

We often get stuck in the crossroads, don’t we? We freeze up, paralyzed by the choices before us. There is a plethora of information available to us. We can Google, research, read. We can ask social media, ask Reddit, ask our neighbor. Decision fatigue, information overload. 

Sometimes, God just needs us to make a decision. 

I find that most of the time, deep down, we know what decision to make. We let the noise distract us, get wrapped up in our yo-yo thoughts. If you’re like me, you speculate on all the possible scenarios. “If I do this, will I mess this up?” “If I go this way, will I miss this?” “What happens if I go right but should have gone left?” We “what if” things apart, debate and ponder and ask for signs and ask for opinions, on and on, until time passes on and we don’t make a decision at all. We stay right where we are, standing in the metaphorical crossroads. 

May I share two more things?  

First, if it’s meant for you, it will not pass you by. If God has appointed it for you, it will not pass you by. You are not so powerful that you can override God’s will in your life. You can delay it, I suppose, hanging out at that crossroads, whatever it may look like for you, but you can’t miss it. You can’t mess it up. 

Second, make a decision. 

Just – make a decision. 

It’s easy to write, harder to do. I know that firsthand. Yet at some point, you have to decide: Right or left? Forward or back? You have to make a decision and trust that God has you – that He is going to align your steps and walk alongside you. 

We can pray for clarity. We should pray for clarity. We should ask for discernment and guidance and walk as closely in His Will for us as we can. But we do need to make a decision. We need to sow the seeds and push the plow. We can become bitter as we watch those around us harvest, but we can’t harvest our own seeds if we’re standing in place, a hand resting on the plow but not pushing it, not tending to our crops. James 2:14-26 reminds us that faith without works is dead. 

“You see that faith was active together with his works and by works faith was made complete.” – James 2:22 

Together with his works. 

Faith – with works. 

Works = action. 

Action = decision. 

Sometimes, friends, we just have to make a decision. 

Otherwise, we’re going to stay stuck in that crossroads for a long time. 

With that said, I think I’m going to venture right… We’ll see where the path may take me.