Hard decisions

Send forth your light and your truth, let them guide me (Psalm 43:3).

Are you facing a tough decision and you don’t know the right thing to do? Break it down into three steps.

First, you need to evaluate your options. Normally, we think about risk—what’s the risk if I do this or don’t do that? How will my choice affect my wallet, my relationships, or my health? But focusing on personal risk ignores a more important question: what moral issues are at stake? As you consider your options, which of them could have an impact on other people? Do any of them go against God’s rules? Every difficult decision has, at its core, a moral dilemma.

This leads to the second step—try to find out what God has to say on the matter. For this step, I recommend getting a devotional book that arranges Bible passages under different topics, so that you can find what you need quickly and easily. Books like these are not expensive—I can usually find them for about five dollars at Christian bookstores. Alternatively, you could visit a church or public library and see if they have this kind of book on the shelf. Of course, there are other options; you could sit down with a pastor or someone else who knows the Bible well. Or you could just open a Bible and start reading; many people have done this and been surprised at coming across something they needed to hear at just that moment in time—a credit to the working of the Holy Spirit.

The third step is to pray and ask Jesus to lead you into making the best decision. Don’t just ask once and then make your choice; ask several times over a period of days. Sometimes the option we are leaning towards is not the direction God would lead us; when this is the case, we need to pray repeatedly so that we are focused more on God than ourselves. We want to give Jesus time to clear our minds so that we can start sharing His priorities.

Making an important, emotional decision takes time. Often, we would rather just make a hasty decision and be done with the inner turmoil. But hard decisions deserve hard work to get them right. Make the effort; involve God in your problem solving, and hard decisions are much more likely to bring good results.