What the heck does God want, anyway?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the decision-making process, in a blog entry called "Making Decisions, Or Not..." This led to some really great (and ongoing) conversations with some of you about the decision-making process, something I've gotten more and more fascinated with. This process was really sparked several years ago after reading a book called "Decision Making and the Will of God", by Garry Friesen. The book provided a great jumping-off point for thinking through some things I had really been struggling with for a while - namely, how much does God want to be  involved in the "minor" details of our lives? I mean, it's a given that God wants us to pray, and to ask Him for guidance. And most of us, if we identify ourselves as followers of Jesus, do that, at least in the major decisions. Should I marry this girl or guy, or not? Should I move a thousand miles away and change careers? Should we buy this house? Should we have kids? Should Tom Cruise be technically classified as a "midget"? You know, the important stuff...

But chances are that most of us aren't dealing with life-changing decisions on a daily basis. Most of us get up in the morning, accomplish what we need to, or least try to, and then go to bed, and start the same process again the next day. And hopefully somewhere in there we share a laugh or two, match our outfits well enough to not invite public ridicule, stay on the right side of the law, and avoid food-poisoning (trust me on this last one - if there's food-poisoning to be had, I'll find it. It's just one of the many services I provide :) In other words, there's a degree of sameness that characterizes many of our days. We've got to do many of the same things, day after day. The question is, how pleasing are we being to God in those things? Is God involved in those seemingly mundane, insignificant things? Does He even want to be?

A few days ago I was reminded of this quote from Anne Lamott: "You can tell you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."  I think the same goes for a lot of things in our lives. You can tell you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God magically wants you to be making all the decisions that you're comfortable making. Interesting, isn't it, that when we look at it honestly (and we sometimes need a little objective outside help in looking at it honestly), that God's will tends to look an awful lot like what we want. Everything becomes a sign from God that supports our actions and thought process if that's what we've decided we want to do. Now certainly, God's will is not automatically opposed to our own. One of the ideas the Garry Friesen book discusses is the notion that walking in God's wisdom, really knowing Him and striving to follow Him, means that my desires begin to line up more and more with God's will. I believe that's true, and I believe it's an idea well-worth teaching in the Christian community today. Most, if not all of us, though, have found ourselves making daily decisions about things based almost solely on what the comfortable thing is, or what our natural inclination is. I probably don't need to tell you that the comfortable or natural isn't always a good indicator of what's pleasing to God. Think through the last few decisions you've made, big, small, and medium sized. Huge, and seemingly not that important. Is God's reputation important to you in making those decisions? Is your integrity important? Have you, as Philippians 2 describes, treated others as more important than yourself? Or do you find that most of them are simply what made you comfortable at the time? Do you find yourself justifying the decisions with God language, because you know people won't argue with you if you say God was present in the decision?

If you see yourself in any of that, welcome to humanity! We've all done it, we've all watched people do it, and we'll all do it again. The exciting part is that God knows that we're prone to this kind of "me-first" based decision making, and He's all about helping us make a shift to a "God-based" process. It doesn't happen overnight, and it's not the easiest thing ever; after all, it does involve fighting your own natural tendencies, which are pretty stubborn. But the Bible is full of amazing verses and passages about how our lives really can reflect who God is...We really can learn to do and be all about the will of God in the big and small of our daily lives - in other words, God can change our natural inclinations to reflect His desires for us. That, by itself, is God's will for us! Let's take this journey together, sharpening each other, and holding each other to this...Anything less is just, well, less than God intends for us...Peace to you all!