choices

God wants you to make a decision

I have recently been struggling with what to do with my life. More specifically, I have been contemplating a career change. This has me thinking about whether or not I want to go back to school, either for my master’s degree or for some type of specialized certification. Where I struggle, however, is in trying to discern what path God wants me to take.

Where does He want me to go? What is He trying to tell me? What is He asking of me? How can I best serve Him and my fellows in this next chapter of my life?

I have prayed extensively about this and I actively listen for answers in meditation. In addition to my spiritual practices, I have also been talking to people I trust and doing a lot of reading, research, and listening to podcasts for inspiration. In spite of all of this, I feel stuck. I simply do not know what my next steps should be.

Then, while driving to church this morning with my daughter, I feel like God gifted me with a clue. My daughter and I were talking about what she wanted to eat for breakfast. I gave her two options and asked her to pick one. Unable to decide, she assigned each choice to one of her hands and asked me to choose, left hand or right.

Growing somewhat frustrated at her indecisiveness, I told her that neither choice was better or worse than the other and that she simply needed to make a decision. As the words left my mouth, I realized that I was telling her the thing I needed to hear. In my words to her, I could hear God speaking to me. As I spoke to her as my child, I could feel God speaking to me as His child, with the same love and sincerity that I have for her in my best paternal moments.

From this perspective, I was able to see that, while God will lovingly lead me to a point, ultimately, He requires that I make a decision. He does this precisely because He loves me enough to not impose His will on me. Like a loving father, He is guiding me, not to blindly do His will, but to make good decisions of my own free will based on what is in my heart.

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

This is the life I would rather be living

I don’t ever want my daughter to feel as though her existence is getting in the way of a life I would rather be living. I want her to feel wanted, appreciated, and cared for. I want her to feel seen, heard, and understood. 

I want her to know that she is important, that she is more important than my personal goals and aspirations, more important than my desires or regrets, and more important than my hobbies and my occupation. 

I want my daughter to know that she can talk to me, confide in me, and come to me for comfort and guidance. I want her to feel safe to tell me anything and to know that, even if I do not always like her choices, she is loved without judgement or conditions. 

I want her to know that there is nothing more important to me than her, that I would and will drop anything and everything if she needs me, and that there is nothing she can ask of me that is too big or too small for me to help her. 

I am not always perfect at this. I make mistakes. I make a lot of mistakes. I put other things before her. I don’t always give her the attention she wants or needs. I am sometimes preoccupied with other things and miss opportunities to see or hear her. But I am trying, and when I make a mistake, we talk about it. I am learning just like she is, and that is important for her to see. 

Children do not choose to come into this world. They have no say in the matter. We make that choice for them and they have to live with our decision. This is something I understood as a child. 

Knowing that I did not make the choice to be here, there were many times growing up where I wished I had never been born. There were many times when I felt like an inconvenience, like there was some other life my parents would rather be living, but they had me instead. Real or imagined, this is what I felt and I don’t ever want my daughter to feel the way that I did. 

This is the life I would rather be living and my daughter is who I want to spend my time with, not because it is an obligation, but because that is the decision that I made when I helped to bring her into this world.