In Search of Wisdom

I started seminary when I was 23 years old. Newly married, kid-less, and with a husband bringing in a Christian school teacher’s salary, we had just enough to make it month to month. Taking on a seminary education did not involve huge personal or financial sacrifice for me.

I am now 31 years old – and in the last eight years, I’ve met so many people who have given up a host of family, friend, and church connections and a financially padded standard of living in order to train for the ministry. They’ve made difficult decisions and sacrifices that have left them lonely and poor and have taxed their spouses and children.

The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing tells us that

God will never disappoint those who truly abandon worldly concerns to dedicate themselves to him. You can be certain of this: he will provide one of two things for his friends. Either they will receive an abundance of all they need or he will give them the physical stamina and a patient heart to endure it. (Chapter 23)

I have seen one of these two things happen for many of God’s friends. Their stories are encouragements – testimonies to God’s faithfulness.

But I have also encountered many who have decided not to make the sacrifices. I honor their decisions. Who am I to say, from personal experience, that these sacrifices can or should be made? How difficult it must be to uproot, to let go of the paycheck, to tear children away from their schools, to take a spouse away from their work. These are legitimate connections - many of which don’t necessarily fall into the category of ‘worldly concerns’ – that keep people from entering the path to a new calling.

And yet, perhaps some of you who are weighing the sacrifice may find hope in these words from The Cloud. ‘Practical’ concerns are very much a part of the discernment process – they’re part of the spiritual journey – God cares about them. Your heavenly Father knows what you need… “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33).

Can I get a witness?

Tags: Books, Call to Ministry, Decisions by Heidi
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The first book I ever read on discernment was The Will of God as a Way of Life: How to Make Every Decision with Peace and Confidence by Jerry Sittser. He said this about God’s will: “If we truly seek God above all, then we will always be doing the will of God, no matter where our particular choices lead us, because seeking God’s kingdom first is God’s will” (p. 39). He wrote this in a chapter appropriately titled, Our Astonishing Freedom.

There is astonishing freedom in what he says. It’s liberating to let go of the unnecessary anxiety surrounding decisions about our future. And I agree with what Sittser writes: “As it turns out, the weightiest choice we make is never between two future options –say, taking a job in California or staying in Iowa—but between two ways of life, one for God, the other against God” (p. 39).

Not long ago, a dear friend of mine was trying to decide between two good possibilities for her future. Most of her friends were assuring her in a Sittser-like way that she really couldn’t make a bad decision – that no matter what, God would bless her in her decision and so she should just make one and go with it.

I asked if this brought her comfort at all. And she said that on one level it did, but it some ways, that kind of encouragement was just frustrating and unhelpful. The fact remained: she still had a weighty decision to make.

Enter: Dallas Willard and his book, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God. He writes, “If you wish to know what God would have you do, it is no help at all to be told that whatever comes is his will. For you are, precisely, in the position of having to decide in some measure what is to come. Does it mean that whatever you do will be God’s will? I certainly hope not” (p. 61).

Who do you agree with? What kind of commentary on God’s will has been helpful to you in your decision making?

Tags: Advice, Books, Decisions by Heidi
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Have you ever done it? Have you ever flipped your Bible open to a random verse hoping that God might meet you in the flipping and the pointing and spill a word for your life?

Dallas Willard, in his book Hearing God comments on this practice of picking random verses. In this practice…

…we see both the desperate urgency and the superstitious character of human efforts to get a word from God, especially a word on what is going to happen and what we should do about it. If necessary some people are prepared to force such a word from him or someone else. Like King Saul many of us have our own versions of a witch of Endor. (p. 33)

I had an embarrassing experience several weeks ago in which I attempted to demonstrate the inappropriateness of Bible Roulette in a high school chapel. Right in the middle of the chapel, I randomly opened my Bible to a verse (Jeremiah 2:3) and read it out loud. Relatively unbeknownst to the 500 high schoolers, the verse was all too appropriate to the context in which I’d set it. I had been telling the students how the Spirit doesn’t speak. And the Spirit spoke. To me, if not to them. Through Bible Roulette.

I told this story to a colleague. After explaining Bible roulette, she said, “Some people have come to seminary using that method.”

So, what do you think? What do you think about Bible Roulette and Saul’s witch of Endor? What do you think about looking for signs and words from God in these ways? Was Gideon’s setting out of the fleece a better way of getting a word from God? Was his methodology simply descriptive, or prescriptive for our own discernment?

Tags: Books, Decisions by Heidi
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First, I invite you to the discussion about pastoral authority and youth that sprung up in the comments on the last post. Follow the discussion, if you’d like!

And next: I learned a new term in a book I read recently on the subject of discernment. The term is liminal space: “that anxious space of ‘not knowing,’ that in-between time when the known and familiar have passed and the new has not yet come into being.” (Wilkie Au and Noreen Cannon Au, The Discerning Heart. New York: Paulist Press, 2006, p. 205.)

Are you there in that in-between space? Perhaps you’re between jobs or relationships. Maybe you are graduating this year from a school and you’re looking ahead to that liminal space. Like nature, we abhor vacuums. We don’t like unfilled space. We want to get to the next thing or the next person as soon as possible. When someone asks us what we do for a living, we want to have an immediate answer. It’s hard to say, “I’m not really sure what’s next.”

The authors of A Discerning Heart encourage us to think positively about ‘liminal space’: “liminal space is psychologically and spiritually significant because it is where real transformation can take place” (p. 208). They go on to quote Jesuit Anthony de Mello:

Some people will never learn anything because they grasp too soon. Wisdom, after all, is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling…. To know exactly where you’re headed may be the best way to go astray. Not all who loiter are lost. (p. 209)

This is kind of a different way to think about being unsure. Maybe not being somewhere is exactly where you need to be.

Tags: Books, Decisions by Heidi
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Welcome to the very first post on a brand-new blog. My name is Heidi De Jonge and I am the pastor for discernment at Calvin Theological Seminary. I’ve started this blog in order to facilitate a conversation for all of us who are in the midst of discerning God’s leading in our lives. I will be posting regularly: posing questions, sharing resources, and searching for wisdom.

I invite you to plumb the depths with me – to ask questions of each other and to share your thoughts and your experiences.

I begin with a quote that I heard on Talk of the Nation on NPR yesterday afternoon…

Paul Roe, a tattoo artist in Washington DC, smoothly defended his trade by saying that “irreversible decisions are good for the soul.”

Irreversible decisions are good for the soul.

I suppose he meant that it is good for a person to take a risk – to cross a line which, once crossed, cannot be uncrossed. Getting a tattoo marks your body, and perhaps your soul, in a defining and irreversible way.

And I began to wonder. What other kinds of decisions are irreversible? Suicide, crossing the Rubicon…

But what kinds of decisions are reversible? Don’t all decisions, like tattoos on the body, leave marks on our souls?

What are your thoughts? Your questions? Your experiences?

Tags: Decisions by Heidi
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