From Jerry Sittser and his book “The Will of God as a Way of Life”:
21 It occurred to me a few years ago that either I had developed the bad habit of missing the will of God for my life or I had a mistaken notion of what God’s will was and is. The first alternative terrified me, for I had lived far too long and made too many irreversible decisions—like getting married and having children—six wish I could start in a vain attempt to get back on track. Besides, I have—had too much evidence at my disposal—such as contentment of life and joy in my work—to assume that I had missed the will of God. It struck me as odd that I could wander that far off without intending to, and yet not know it.
So I concluded that I had misunderstood what God’s will really is. Like a detective who had followed one dead end after another, I decided to pursue another course altogether. I began to explore a different way of approaching the will of God. It proved to be one of the most exciting decisions I ever made.
Suffering Loss
The inability to predict the future was the first clue that set me searching in a different direction. But it was not the only clue I had. A second clue came from suffering loss. My wife and I had four wonderful children, two girls and two boys. We were deliriously happy. But that happiness—what we assumed was the “will of God” for our lives—came to a sudden halt in the fall of 1991 when a drunk driver jumped his lane and collided with our minivan, killing Lynda, my mother Grace, who was visiting us for the weekend, and my daughter Diana Jane. Four of us survived. John, then only two, was seriously hurt. Catherine (eight), David (seven) and I were injured, though not badly enough to require hospitalization.
That experience set me thinking about the will of God. I had assumed that my marriage to Lynda was the will of God, that our family of six was the will of God, that the happy, stable, prosperous life we enjoyed together was the will of God. We were, as so many said, “the ideal family.” How could God allow such a tragedy to happen?
I could not believe that God had suddenly changed his mind about what he willed for us—a good marriage and a healthy family. How, then, could my life as a single father of three traumatized children also be the will of God? The accident forced me to reconsider my assumptions about God’s will. Did God plan only ‘the good life” for me? If so, I wondered how I could integrate suffering into my understanding of God’s will. Or did God plan something very different for me, something still good, but also something very different for me, something still good, but also hard and painful at the same time? If so, I had to face the prospect that my approach to the will of God was entirely mistaken.
I started to read the Bible with fresh eyes, too. The Bible provided the third and final clue. As I will explain in the next chapter, I discovered that the Bible says very little about the will of God as a future pathway. Instead, the Bible warns us about anxiety and presumption concerning the future, assures us that God is in control, and commands us to do the will of God we already know in the present. Over time I scrutinized my assumptions and reconsidered the “conventional” approach to the will of God that I had followed up to that point.
The Conventional Approach
I am not sure how or where I had learned the conventional approach to the will of God. I think I simply accepted it from the very beginning as gospel truth without much reflection, much as I accept the way letters are arranged in the alphabet.
Convention teaches us that the will of God consist of a specific pathway we should follow into the future. God knows what this pathway is and he has laid it out for us to follow. Our responsibility is to discover this pathway—God’s plan for our lives. Unfortunately, it is not always obvious. If anything it is ambiguous. We must figure out which of the many pathways we could follow is the one we should follow, the one God has planned for us. If and when we make the right choice, we will receive his favor, fulfill our Divine destiny, and exceed in life.
When a decision has to be made, everything suddenly becomes like a maze. We believe there is only one way out. All the other ways are dead ends, every one of them a bad choice, We believe that God knows the right way. He has, after all, willed it for us, and we must discover what that will is. The consequences of our choices are therefore weighty. If we choose rightly, we will experience his blessing and achieve success and happiness. If we choose wrongly, we may lose our way, miss God’s will for lives, and email lost forever in an incomprehensible maze.
As a result, we pray for guidance, we look for signs, we seek advice, we read he Bible for insight, and we search our hearts. We wait in the hope that God will give us a clear signal. We think that a voice form heaven would be nice. The moment finally arrives, however, when we must choose. . . . We must take one pathway, turning away all others.
~` Jerry Sittser and his book “the Will of God as a Way of Life”, (Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530 USA, Zondervan 2000,2004) p. 21-23 (continued)