Make a Move

How to Stop Wavering and Make Decisions in a Disorienting World

Stephanie Williams O'Brien

• Publisher: Broadleaf Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506465920
• eBook ISBN: 9781506465937
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

We make thousands of decisions each day, and while most of them are simple and relatively easy, many of us get stuck in the larger, life-altering decisions. This can lead to frustration, anxiety, and confusion. "It would be so much easier if life just came with a road map!" But life doesn't work like that--it's full of twists and turns, the unexpected and the unforeseen. And yet, the uncertainty of life also brings adventure and exploration, surprises and wonder.

In Make a Move, pastor and coach Stephanie Williams O'Brien offers practical advice and action steps for moving through the experiments of life. These steps help us narrow down the choices when it seems like the options are endless, and allow us to discern God's leadership in a way we never could while standing still.

It's time to move from a disoriented life to a life of direction and intention. It's time to make a move!

Part 1

Discernment through Movement

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

1

All Life Is an Experiment

I sat alone in an empty house hundreds of miles from home. I could feel my heartbeat pick up the pace as though I were jogging and beginning to sprint. Beads of sweat gathered on my forehead, I started to feel light-headed, and I thought I was going to faint, or be sick, or both. I tried to take a deep breath, but it was as though someone had shrunk my lungs to half their capacity, and I couldn’t get the oxygen in quickly enough.

“What should I do? What should I do?” The refrain circled in my brain, and I couldn’t get it to stop. Soon it came pouring loudly out of my mouth and into the small room along with my tears.

I look back on that experience from a handful of years ago and realize that the unfamiliar set of sensations was a panic attack. I had experienced anxiety in my life before, but nothing like that. I felt completely out of control.

What was it that brought on one of the most intense experiences of my life?

A decision.

Research suggests we make up to thirty-five thousand decisions a day—from what we will wear and eat, to how we respond to others, to which route we will take to work.1 But then there are decisions like the one I was facing—decisions you know will be life-altering depending on which option you choose. It was one of those deep, “this changes everything” decisions that caused my first panic attack.

Those sort of life-altering decisions don’t come around every day. However, many of the decisions I face daily are important enough that they raise my blood pressure or shoot some amount of cortisol through my body. We make the majority of our thirty-five thousand decisions each day without thinking about it. But how do we approach the ones that are more important and consequential?

As I began to regain control of my mind and heart following that scary panic attack, I realized why this decision had shaken me to the core. I simply didn’t know what to do in a scenario that would be life-altering no matter the outcome. I had tried everything: making lists of pros and cons, getting advice (advice that I was only sometimes actually asking for), and pleading with God to put “writing on the wall” or on some paper—or really anywhere would be fine, God! Just tell me what to do!

I tried every formula for decision-making I could find, and the only result was wavering that led me to severe decision paralysis. In the time since, I’ve had countless conversations with others about decision-making, and I always ask them this question: What is your philosophy of decision-making and spiritual discernment? Almost no one has a confident answer. That lack of a solid approach to making important decisions in life can hold us back and keep us wavering when we may otherwise make a move and take bold steps—even when the future is uncertain.

If I review the story of my life, I see many moments like this, where I felt tortured by a decision—not to the point of full-out panic, but tortured nevertheless. An unavoidable aspect of the human experience is that we will face many truly life-changing decisions. And many of our decisions affect others significantly.

What I didn’t fully realize in that moment is that I wasn’t alone in my decision-making. Something tells us, as people trying to follow God in this world, that the decisions are about more than just us or our lists of pros and cons. That something is the Holy Spirit.

One of the last things Jesus said to his closest friends on earth was that they would never be alone. That he was going to send the Spirit to be with them.2 He said that the Holy Spirit would be a “counselor.” The word in Greek is parakletos. It is sometimes translated as “helper, advocate, or comforter.”

Jesus wanted his friends to understand how important this Spirit truly is because he stayed on the subject for quite a while. He said the Spirit is your helper and will always be with you and never leave you. This counselor will help you remember all that Jesus said but will also help teach you what you have yet to learn. The Spirit advocates for truth—the truth about who you are, your deepest identity, in light of the truth about God and God’s identity.

While I admit this all sounds a lot more mystical than a pros-and-cons list, I think I like it. In that moment of panic, I would have loved a helper or a comforter. A counselor to help untangle the thoughts in my mind and the emotions that seemed to be attacking my heart. But all I could actually ask for in that moment was an answer. Not a guide, not an advocate of truth, but an “I’m freaking out here, so just tell me what to do!”

My understanding of God for much of my life had not led me to an encounter with the Spirit of God; rather, it had taught me that I should be asking God to just tell me the right answer. In hindsight, I can see that the decisions I made were rarely “right or wrong” but rather “bad, OK, good, better, or best.” They were less about God having one specific will for the situation and more about God offering a counselor who would help me wrestle through the decisions that didn’t have a clear right or wrong answer.

Not Merely a Will but a Way

Our obsession with the “will of God” is well documented. Many preachers, scholars, and pastors have argued that the pursuit of the will of God is encouraged throughout Scripture, and I wouldn’t disagree. But when it comes to actually determining the will of God, I think we run into a methodological problem.

A select few stories in the Bible lead us to believe that God will show up with clear answers—stories of God audibly speaking, waking up a sleeping person, showing up in a flaming bush, writing on a wall with a creepy floating hand, or some equally disturbing image.

God could, and may still, speak this way to some people in some instances—I have no interest in limiting what God can do. But most of what we read in Scripture suggests that the way most followers of Yahweh have tried to figure out how God is leading is a lot messier and much less clear. Far more often, we see people in Scripture crying out to God for wisdom in the midst of complex situations rather than simply hearing God’s voice.

When Jesus was speaking to his friends, he promised that this counselor would come after him. So they waited for the Spirit to come, and when it did, it was the fire that ignited what became the early church. If you follow their story through Acts, you’ll see no burning bushes or creepy hands writing on walls. There were a few dreams and visions. But what seems most common is some sort of group brainstorming—or even bickering—and then a lot of what seems like trial and error.

But what if there is no such thing as trial and error?

The Scientific Method

A scientist would never consider their work “trial and error.” They would say they are executing experiments and then learning from the results. Sure, there are times when an experiment is botched because the petri dish got contaminated. Or perhaps someone accidentally poured out the mason jar in which their little seahorses were going to hatch (I’m still getting over that one!).

These obvious mistakes aside, the point of an experiment is to learn and then to take what you learned into the next experiment. So an experiment isn’t trial and error; it’s trial and learn! The details of the scientific method vary depending on whom you ask, but the steps are relatively simple:

• Step 1: Define your question—or what you are hoping to learn.
• Step 2: Do your research and creative brainstorming—see what has been learned and what answers have been discovered by others in the past. Also make sure you consider various creative options for the experiment itself.
• Step 3: Determine the first experiment you will try that will answer your question or help you learn more.
• Step 4: Name the steps of your experiment and execute them for a predetermined amount of time.
• Step 5: Analyze and review the results and determine what was learned.

When I read about the encounters Jesus’s early followers had with the counselor, the helper we call the Holy Spirit, they appear to be following something like the scientific method. When something that seems supernatural does happen, they aren’t usually waiting for it. Rather, they keep their eyes and ears open as they are on the move. It is in the midst of these experiments that they notice different ways God’s Spirit is leading. But they don’t seem to be digging for the “will of God” each time they encounter a new decision.

Rather, it seems more like a series of experiments takes them to places they never would have planned to visit before they set off. Imagine if they had hosted a “strategic planning meeting” before launching arguably the largest movement that humanity has ever witnessed. There is no doubt in my mind that their “strategic plan” would have paled in comparison to what God led—and is still leading—in this movement we call the church.

When it comes to the “will of God,” we must ask, What if God is more interested in the way we make decisions than in the final decisions themselves?

Depending on your background, that question may be difficult to read. Hear me out on this. God seems much more interested in a relationship with humans than in forcing rituals onto them. The Spirit of God invites humans to join in God’s work rather than be controlled and forced to do God’s work.

When Jesus promised this counselor would come, he said to his friends, “Be careful to do everything I taught you.” He wasn’t talking to hear himself think out loud! However, it’s clear that these aren’t empty marching orders; rather, they are an invitation to a relationship where the Spirit will reveal God’s preferred future—if that’s what we actually want to see. To paraphrase Jesus in this part of the story, “Try to do everything I told you, but don’t worry, I am going to send my Spirit to guide you because life is complex. If my leadership is truly what you want to seek, then the Spirit will lead you through the messiness of life.”

Discernment for the Jesus follower is all about the relationship, not about getting it right or wrong. Perhaps the initial question we all need to ask is this: Do we want God’s Spirit involved in our decisions? How we answer will determine the steps we will take. If we choose to approach life’s decisions by creating experiments, they can give us an opportunity to see what is “good to us and the Holy Spirit,” as the early church seems to wonder as they wander through their story.3

By the end of the first part of this book, you will see how each step of the scientific method involves God’s leadership. But that’s a good moment to stop and reflect on our openness to that leadership in the first place.

The Way, the Truth, the Life

While I think God rarely has one very specific will for each decision we need to make, God does want us to take steps of faith in order to join in what God is doing in the world around us and in our lives. This is a daily, moment-by-moment choice to be consciously dependent on the Holy Spirit in our everyday lives.

Does that mean some decisions aren’t relegated to right or wrong or in God’s will or out of God’s will? Absolutely. Many, if not most, decisions involve more nuance and an invitation to use our own free will.

Jesus said to his friends, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”4 Many followers of Jesus cling to this phrase as a source of identity. I think I know why: we so often don’t know the way, we aren’t sure what is true, and we know there has to be more to life. Jesus is saying that he is the way to God—yes, regarding our eternal future, but this phrase is about today and tomorrow as well.

If we want to make good decisions today—and if we want to avoid panic attacks tomorrow—we have to shift our mindset to recognize that many decisions don’t have one perfect right answer that we must discover or else we’ve failed. In the experience I mentioned earlier, I was fixated on not getting this decision wrong, and that is what led to my crippling anxiety. It was not one of the more “resourced versions of myself,” as my therapist has kindly defined. Demanding that God tell me what to do—as though there were only one specific will for my life in every situation—was not my best moment.

I was trying to get God to take the work of discernment off of my shoulders when I knew full well that God leading me around like a puppet on a string was not what I actually hoped for. I was not embracing the full life Jesus said5 he came to offer. Stay tuned for more on how this experience in my life unfolded.

Spiritual director Ruth Haley Barton defines spiritual discernment as “an ever increasing capacity to ‘see’ or discern the works of God in the midst of the human situation so that we can align ourselves with whatever God is doing.”6 Being a part of what God is doing in the world will shape your decision-making in amazing ways.

I invite you to join me as we discover together the freedom, adventure, and strength that comes from asking Jesus to lead us in the way we make decisions. We can find great meaning in discerning God’s leadership rather than begging for shortcuts and simplistic answers.

The beginning of this book will build on this framework for how we can think about decisions and discernment. Then in part 2, we will break down actual experime...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Part 1: Discernment through Movement
• Part 2: I Dare You to Move
• Part 3: Move into Your Future
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Decision-Making Toolbox
• Notes