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13 March 2004
Alpha Talk 6
“How Does God Guide Us?”
Jennifer K. Morrow
How does God guide us? This question
operates, rises or falls on one very basic assumption: that God guides us. There is no how
about it if there is no guiding going on in the first place. So as I sat with this question,
wondering how to answer it together today, I found myself compelled to ask the more basic, more
fundamental question regarding the assumption on which anything I say had better be based: Does
God guide us?
One quick flip through the hymnal should clue
us in: Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah. Lead Me Lord. I Have Decided to Follow Jesus. Lead On,
O King Eternal. But maybe you don’t like any of those hymns. Maybe you’re not convinced.
Well then, let’s turn to the church for an
answer; and not just our church but the church at all times and in all places. Does God guide
us? The church answers in even more ways than the hymnal. Think about church architecture.
I’d venture a guess that most of the church buildings you’ve been in have had some sort of aisle
leading to some sort of altar. There’s something to that. It wasn’t put in for weddings. It
indicates a journey of some sort. And the aisle leads in the direction of the altar where there
is often a cross, a communion table, or at the very least a minister.
And there is another significant part of the
church’s answer to this question, Does God guide us? I better sure as hell hope so or I’m out
of a job. The church has always called on certain people to lead, to shepherd, to care for
specific communities. And that leading has always (hopefully) had a certain distinction.
People don’t come to church looking for help with their taxes, they usually come looking for God
and God’s guidance. If God is not guiding us then there’s nothing particularly compelling or
unique that I can offer you and it’s only a matter of time until you start to figure out that I
am really ripping you off. But maybe you don’t come to church for guidance. Maybe you come for
friendship. And so maybe you’re still not convinced.
So how about the bible? Does God guide us?
There are few questions as readily answerable by scripture as is this one. From the beginning
God is guiding. God guides Abraham to Canaan. God guides the Israelites out of Egypt in a
pillar of smoke. Then God leads them through the wilderness for forty years to make it back to
Canaan. In the Old Testament alone God leads about 19 people up 19 mountains for some sort of
revelation, instruction, or counsel. The gospels tell us that the Spirit of God leads Jesus
into the wilderness to be tempted for forty days. It’s everywhere. In fact, it hardly seems a
stretch to rename the whole thing, The Bible: 101 Ways God Guides Us. Surely by now you’re
convinced.
But armed with all these examples and sitting
on my couch pondering this question I realized that I was not convinced. I realized as I sat
there that I wasn’t sure I believed that God guides us. And that may be a good first sentence
for my new book, 101 Things to Say if You Want to Get Fired From the Ministry. God’s guidance
is attested to by scripture, is a wonderfully comforting thought, and for me anyway, reliable
job security. And yet…and yet there I sat realizing, “I don’t know if I believe God guides
us.” At this point I’m sincerely hoping that those of you sitting there thinking, “I’m not sure
I’m sure either” outnumber, or can at least out box the number of those of you sitting there
thinking, “Heretic.”
But I knew I couldn’t stand up here and say
“God doesn’t guide us.” Nor did I want to. I hope God guides us, but I don’t feel sure of it.
So faced with this situation, let me try to do what I often try to do when feeling unsure: If
I’m not sure it is, then let me at least think about what it is like.
God’s guidance is like waking up. God’s
guidance is less like figuring something out and more like waking up and this is why. When we
talk about God’s guiding of us we often use words like discernment. To discern something
certainly means to understand, but it also means to see. Just to be able to make out what’s
there. And so when we talk about discernment when it comes to God’s guidance, it means more
than figuring something out: does God want me to take this new job or does God want me to stay
in my old job. I am not crass, cynical, or stupid enough to stand up here and say to you, God
doesn’t care if you take the job or not. Because even though my experience may leave me feeling
exactly that crass, cynical, and stupid, I cannot rely only on my experience for an answer.
While specific outcomes to specific situation can certainly be a part of what we are enabled to
discern with God’s guidance, there is more to it; much, much more. And the more is God.
Discernment, what God is guiding us to by means of the hymnal, the church, the Bible, the
Spirit, our experience is God. Discernment is discovering God, not just or even mostly what God
wants me to do in my life. God is not nearly as invested in keeping us from messing up as God
is invested in drawing us into relationship and knowledge of him. God is so much more than some
cosmic magic eight ball waiting for us to shake it around and find out if “outlook is good.”
And it’s not that the answers to life’s little and big questions are irrelevant to God. I am
not standing here trying to convince you that God doesn’t care. Rather, God does care, so much
that to say God cares is second-runner-up for understatement of the year. What I’m trying to
convince you of is that the answers to your questions, the guidance for your lostness, the
flashlight for your dark hallway is not some pre-formed answer floating out there in the
mysterious galaxy of God’s will, nor is it necessarily in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verse 12.
God guides us by revealing Godself to us and telling us that that is where we belong, and that
is where he has been taking us from the beginning. And so God guides us by knowing us,
allowing us to know ourselves, and not remaining hidden but by making himself knowable. And God
is most fully knowable, as we have already said, in what God does. And what God has done is
come to earth and put on life and flesh and breath in the person of Jesus Christ. And then
later in that same person God dies. What does this say about where God is leading us? Or think
of the Bible. What does it teach us? The Bible is not a big instruction manual it is a
biography, or autobiography depending on your particular stance on the origins of scripture, of
God. And what the biography tells us is that God is hopelessly in love with his creation,
despite creation’s best attempts to sway that love, God keeps plugging away at it.
And so God’s guidance is more about God than
it is about us. We are not stuck in the unenviable position of God’s leading and guidance
dragging us further into the vortex of our own narcissism. God’s guidance can be a rescue from
that. During seminary I worked as an Administrative Assistant at a church. The minister I
worked with was a wonderful man. And part of what I loved about him was when I’d be around for
one of his rants. He had very few, but when he had them they were nearly always hilarious and
nearly always about the bane of his pastoral existence: young college couples in love. The
church where we worked was situated at the edge of a Christian college campus which meant a
steady stream of star-crossed lovers making their way into the minister’s office for every
imaginable version of advice with some question about whether it was God’s will for them to get
married, break up, or go to third base. Christians often make the mistake of thinking that
God’s guidance has mostly to do with them. But that‘s where we‘re wrong.
God guides me by ruthlessly staying after me
until I am exposed to a glimpse of his reality long enough to see how much more wonderful that
it is than anything I have ever let myself know or share. Once I have tasted that reality I
will never be the same. I can try my hardest to forget it and the hound of heaven will be at my
heels. We love because God first loved us. Our actions, find their source in the person of
God. My example is this one. One day, somehow, through some undistinguishable combination of
people, and scriptures, and sermons, and scriptures, and experiences, and coincidences, and
mystery I believe that God loves. Then, on another day, somehow, through some undistinguishable
combination of people, and scriptures, and sermons, and scriptures, and experiences, and
coincidences, and mystery I believe that God loves me. This knowledge is too wonderful for me
to contain, but luckily knowledge is not for containing but for being transformed by. And so
if God loves me then I do not have to be as worried about my own failings, which means I don’t
have to be as invested in noticing the failings of others around me, which means I am less
likely to use the people closest to me to feel better about myself, which means I am freer to
love them, which means they may receive some of that love, which means they may know for their
own moment that they are loved, which means they may be able to begin to be more gentle with
themselves, which means they will be able to begin to be more gentle with others, which means
that sappy or pious or idyllic or schmaltzy or cute this sounds it doesn’t matter because what
matters is not sounding good but knowing that you are loved. And when it comes to making
decisions, and if you’re interested in knowing God’s will, love is always closer to God than
sounding good.
When it comes to God’s guidance and
direction, I’ve always been more comfortable when it comes in the form of an experience or a
relationship or a book. I confess I am suspicious of the miraculous and people who say that God
talks to them. Maybe I am jealous. Maybe they are crazy. Maybe we are both. Whatever the
case, I decided that it is not so important how God guides us. We can and do receive it in so
many ways I imagine it would scare the pants off of us if we realized it. What I think matters
most about God’s guidance then is not how it happens, but that it happens, what it reveals and
where that takes us. By that it happens I mean that I changed my mind from that moment on the
couch I told you about in the beginning. I can’t preach all this “God loves us” stuff and then
expect you or myself to believe that what God loving us means is that we’ve been left here to
flounder around alone with no help. If that were really the case, I doubt we’d have made it
this far. Even God nearly killed everything in the flood. I hardly dare to assume that left to
our own devices we’d do much better. And by what it reveals, what I mean is that the content of
God’s guidance is first of all about God and then about us. A relationship is two or more
people knowing each other. We are already known, so known in fact, that the psalmist has a hard
time wrapping his brain around it: [read from Psalm 139] What’s left in the relationship then
is knowing God. And finally it matters where this revelation, this knowledge takes us. That’s
what makes it guidance. There’s a journey involved. We aren’t just handed some information and
expected to leave it in the trunk.
So what do we know? What can we say at this point? We know that
God guides us. And if by this point if we don’t know that we are working harder to not know it
that we would have to work to know it. God’s guidance is all over the Bible, all over our
worship, and likely the only reason the church is still standing. And maybe God’s guidance is
all over your experience too. Maybe you have asked God to help you decided on a career path or
a spouse or a dry cleaner and you are certain God guided you to make the right choice. If this
is you, then God’s guidance is all over your conscious experience. I need to let you know,
however, if this is not you, it is not me either. The reasons for this are debatable and maybe
interesting, but not all that important. And what I know I usually experience I know we all
sometimes experience: the absolute undeniable absence of God in the decisions we make in the
little wildernesses of our lives. And let me just say that you are even more deluded than I if
you think that God has never felt absent to you in such a way. To admit such absence is not to
deny the many ways God can guide us in the dailyness of our lives; rather it can clue us in to
another reality of God’s guidance, of the way God leads us: God is leading us whether we ask
for it or not, always and everyday back to somewhere bigger than a new job. God is leading us
back to God. We need not ask for this, and it is only helpful and not necessary that we even be
aware of it. It is always going on. And God will stop at nothing to get us there. And so how
is God doing it? How does God guide us? In all that we have said: in scripture, in worship, in
the church, in our own intellect, in our experiences, in our knowledge and in the absence of
it.
Each week Javier and I have tried to answer whatever question
happened to be before us in a personal way, because as we have said from the beginning,
Christianity is not a set of beliefs but a way of life. This has been an important challenge to
me, especially with a question like today’s. How does God guide us? When I asked it of myself
I thought, I don’t think I think God does. Through grace of the page I have changed my mind, or
better put, remembered something I already knew. Let me tell you a story about how I
experienced God’s guidance, being led to love and led back to him: It concerns the two things I
least expected about having a child. One is how much I love her. When I heard her cry for the
second time, the first as she was being born was more miraculous and reassuring, but when I
heard it for the second time as I held her it split my heart. Another time, I turned around
toward the backseat while waiting for a roast beef sandwich in a drive-thru line and I caught a
glimpse of her. Everything stopped except the breath that poured out of me trying to make room
for the love. The other thing that makes this so hard is how much I love me. I did not know
how much I mattered to me until I came into the presence of another who required that she matter
more. Immediately. I could not tell her to wait while I tended to my precious self. No grace
period. The advent of little Claire shone a bright and accusatory light into the deep, dark
parts of me no one was supposed to find out about.
I have long wrestled with an addiction to
completely freaking out. I think that’s the clinical term for it anyway. This addiction is
characterized by cataclysmically blowing out of proportion various situations. The night we
brought Claire home from the hospital, she got a little sick. I, according to the American
Journal of Psychiatry, completely freaked out. It is ugly when I do this. Also, mostly self
serving. Instead of finding whatever it takes to gain perspective I simply melt down. It
requires so much less effort. I become very dramatic and start wondering aloud, between wails,
if I have actually gone crazy. I require ample patience, help, and attention. I usually
recover within a few hours, or with the purchase of food or shoes. This is the poop I pulled
the night Claire got the poops. Gabe said to me, “You cannot do this. You just have to stop.”
I said to Gabe, “[Insert any number of excuses why I can’t stop.]” Gabe said to me, “But you
have to.” I said to Gabe, “How?” Gabe said to me, “You just do it.” And so I did.
Let me be clear that I do not believe that a
woman can “just stop” postpartum depression. I myself sought various kinds of medical help for
extreme baby blues, and I am glad I did. But my little episode the night Claire came home was
not depression; it was, as I referred to it before, an addiction. It was not the first time I
had reacted in such a way. As I write this twelve months later I can tell you that it would not
be the last. But this not-the-first-time and not-the-last-time was also a first time. It was
the first time I truly faced this tendency of mine. It was the first time I allowed myself the
kind of self-awareness necessary to curb this self-absorption. This screamy, poopy baby sat me
down at one of those metal interrogation tables, shone the light on my face and told me to take
a good long look in the double sided mirror on the wall. And so I did.
Occasions for this kind of mucking around in our own mud come
along all throughout our lives. I suppose any number of things can bring them about. We are
confronted by change of place, change of pace, or the birth of a child. And these moments
matter because they are signs of hope. God is guiding us. In her small and accidental way,
Claire asked me to be a better person. This is a hard thing to have asked of you because in the
asking of it there is inherent the reality that you are not necessarily a very good person. But
in love, we may respond. We answer and become better people. And not just because Claire needs
me to be. If her presence is the only reason I would endeavor to grow, then poor Claire. What
a burden to place on someone who did not ask for anything of the sort. We answer and become
better people not because of one person or influence, but because we must, and by God’s grace
and thanks to God’s guidance, we can.
To be transformed by and to love is the most
radical of acts. If I say I can stop freaking out because I want to love someone other than
myself--more than myself--this is no small thing. In that I do what a peace demonstration with a
thousand in-sitters tries to do. A little revolution is in the works.
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