I sometimes wish for a break from making decisions. It seems like my wife and I have had one big hairy decision after another this last year. From saying goodbye to our family, friends, and ministry in Seattle, to selling a house, to relocating our family from the West Coast to the East Coast, to buying a house (sight unseen!), to making educational choices for our growing kids, to deciding how and if Corrie could finish her counseling degree at another school, etc. We often wished we had the benefit of just a tiny peak into the future. Each decision was like a domino affecting the others; we wanted to get them right.
Yet each time, we had to make decisions with less than all the facts.
That weighed on us. It still weighs on us. For some strange reason, my wife and I got it into our heads growing up that God would bless us if we got everything right. This warped theology (which thankfully we’ve renounced) often added an extra burdensome overlay to our decision making. Not only could the next bad decision screw up our lives practically, it could also provoke God’s anger and withhold his blessing spiritually, too. This, friends, is a burden too heavy to bear. (Note: our decisions do have consequences and sinful decisions displease God. But we aren’t talking about making decisions about whether or not to do something sinful here.)
Just this morning, we found ourselves fretting at the kitchen counter over some new decisions. Again, we realized we didn’t have all the information. We didn’t know everything we wanted to know about the situation. But we reminded each other that we were doing the best with what we knew to do.
With that, all we could do was lean back into the grace of a God who knows the end from the beginning.
I’m so glad God is omniscient. Not only does he have all the facts, he has the perspective to make sense of the facts, wisdom to apply them, and impeccable timing. The crushing weight of “getting things right all the time” is for his shoulders. Friends, Corrie and I are still in the kindergarten class of God’s grace! We’ve barely begun to plumb the depths. But we can tell you this: even when we make what prove to be dumb decisions, God’s grace is there.
The best decision we’ve ever made is to trust that God’s grace will hold us up in uncertain times. We can go back to being humans and let God be the omniscient one.
The Sent Life 