Another bit of the book I'm writing. First draft.

Stumbling Through and Fumbling Through

We Plymouth Brethren lived a pretty weird life, most would say.  Our church culture was full of contradictions and control, odd sacrifices made for a God who would have been odder yet, had He been as we imagined Him.  And why we were living this way, did we say?  We were just simply doing the Lord’s Will.  That’s what we said we were doing and why we said we were doing it.

It was, as I’ve said, a clear dichotomy: you could either do your will, or you could do the Lord’s Will, which absolutely involved not doing yours.  So you could either do what you wanted, or what He wanted, and you could be sure there was no way those two sets of agendas could ever be brought together or negotiated.  You could be sure that, no matter how spiritual you became, no matter how infused with the bible and God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit you became, you’d never want to do what He wanted you to.  I think there was a myth of non-growth.  Like, that God didn’t really make us better. He just stopped planning on sending us to Hell.  When we went to Heaven, He’d cut out of us our capacity to want things (along with our tear ducts), and those problems would be over.

While your average non-church kid was being asked “What do you want to do with your life?”  or “Which one do YOU want?” we were always being asked what God wanted.  Like it was simple. Like He was going to let us kids know in advance.  Like all we had to do was follow the script He’d promised to give us. The Map of our Future.

I’ve already mentioned Bill’s comment about how Christians do whatever they want, and then say God told them to do it.  Well, many lived like this. Others really convinced themselves that whatever they did, if it worked out well, must have been the Lord’s Will, as He’d blessed them in it (it hadn’t gone horribly awry.)  After all, if it hasn’t been His Will, He’d have cursed it, right?

It was pretty simple, in theory.  So I frequently refused to act until God let me know what He wanted.  I would resolve to wait until He made His Heart known, and only then would I act.  Everyone agreed this was absolutely the thing to do. I agreed it was. 

Thing is?  He didn’t agree to work like that.  And He made it pretty clear to me that He flat out refused to work that way.

To begin with, it tortured me.  I was paralyzed and afraid to act, afraid to decide or choose anything.  How could I learn the Lord’s Will so I could just do It, in simple obedience to It?  In the bible, people heard a Voice.  This would have terrified me, but I kind of wanted it too.  You see, I didn’t want the pressure of having to figure things out, know my own heart, use what wisdom I had, ask God for more wisdom, make a decision based on the best information I had, using the best judgment I had, and then live with the consequences, even if I’d made a mistake.

Turns out God expected me to do just that, exactly like that.

God wasn’t exactly The Divine Watchmaker, but there was an instructive story laid out for me in the bible which seemed to apply more to my life than a voice from Heaven telling me which kind of wood (shittim) and how many cubits (10 x 30).

The story (told in the gospels in a couple of different versions, for instance in Matthew 25:14-29) involves a nobleman who gives his three servants money (the KJV calls the unit of currency “talents”) to invest.  Each gets a different amount, because of their differing levels of financial expertise.  And the nobleman leaves them to do this as they see fit. He goes away on a journey for a long time. 

When he comes back, he wants to see how they’ve done in his absence, following their best judgment.  He’d already shown he knew who had the best judgment of the three, but he’d still given the one clueless guy a talent to invest, so he could learn.  The first two each managed to double the investment, and gave all the money to the nobleman when he got back. In return he put them in positions of greater responsibility and importance and invited them to “enter into [his]...joy.”

But the third servant had a different situation.  He knew that the nobleman expected results.  He was afraid. So he dug a hole, hid the money, and dug it up and gave it back to him upon his return, having lost not a coin of it.

The nobleman was furious, told him off for not even bothering to keep it safe in a bank, where it would have collected interest, and took the money from him and gave it to the highest earner of the other two.  A cautious, non-committal path was NOT okay with this guy.

Now, if I was honest, I realized that I’d been given potential (life, a mind, talents) and was going to try to refuse to develop, let alone follow, sound judgment.  I just wanted to “simply obey.”   And really important decisions were hard. Often, it turned out, they were hard because there was merit in deciding either way.  When there was a decision to be made, and one way was likely to work out, and the other one not, I called those “easy decisions.”  Hard ones were different.

Even decisions like “Should we get an Radio Shack Colour Computer 2, a Coleco Adam, an Apple IIe, or a Commodore 64?” didn’t seem to be ones that God was going to help with, though they mattered very much to me. 

He actually, really seemed to expect me to learn all I could, talk to some people, figure things out, follow the best judgment I had, and then be willing to live with the results.  Even if I made a poor decision, He seemed very okay with that.  Helped, even.  Not that I made enough poor decisions to really enjoy how much God enjoys helping us make lemonade of our lemons.  Mostly I avoided decisions if I could.  Mostly by doing the same thing the same way every time.  This consistently annoyed and annoys Him if I do it.

One of the first times I met my friend Mark, I asked him how exactly one found the Lord’s Will.  He just tossed “I don’t believe in the Lord’s Will,” back over his shoulder while going into a narrow stairwell to climb down a few floors by pressing hands and feet out against the side walls and generally being Spider-Man.  Mark often speaks for effect, and to make you think, rather than to express the entire complexity of an opinion of his.  And it made me think.  How workable was the idea of waiting to know the Lord’s Will before acting?  There were verses one could quote to argue either side of that one, certainly.

But something about how the old folks were presenting “The Lord’s Will” concept seemed a bit...off.  They connected it to the idea that God had a Plan for us.  Like my GPS plotting a route to Boston. 

My GPS is pretty good.  Besides depicting my car on-screen as the General Lee from
The Dukes of Hazzard (or the Batmobile, a dalek or an X-Wing, depending on my mood) and speaking in a female voice with a British accent, if I make a mistake while driving, it figures out, on the fly, how to adjust the route so I still end up in Boston.  Without needing to drive all the way back to the place where I first messed up, once I am totally lost.  It just figures out where I’ve gotten to, and how to still get where I’m heading, though the journey is now different, in terms of what are now appropriate turns and perhaps in terms of expected time-frame as well.

It seems to me that in some people’s minds, God wasn’t as smart, or as helpful anyway, as my GPS.  I asked and was repeatedly told that, should I get things wrong, one time, in following the Lord’s carefully laid out Plan For Me (Plan 9?) that I would certainly have to return back to the beginning and start over, repenting in dust and ashes.  There are many bible stories that kind of make this point.  Well, to be honest, mostly they present the idea that, once people mess up properly, they are just screwed.  That’s it for many of them.

In reality, things don’t really work that way in my dealings with life and God.  And some stuff can’t be undone, anyway. Sometimes there simply is no “going back.”  Destruction of property.  Ruined relationship.  Adultery.  Injury to others.  Pregnancy.  And in reality, the God I tend to encounter while I’m living my life seems more than comfortable rolling with those choices, whatever they are. The game seems to be to try.  A lot gets worked out on the fly. 

Obeying sounds good.  So why not obey God when He wants me to follow wise judgment, based on experience, listening to others, and looking to honour Him, given what’s in the bible?  Why try to refuse to do that?  Why bury potential in the ground and wait for Him to come back so we can hand him our talent, our life, our time, pretty much unused, but a bit gritty and damp, just because He wouldn’t give us stone tablets, or the address and phone number of the girl, job or house?  Why not do what He wants us to, which is figure some of it out “on our own”?

I think the professionals call this “stumbling through and fumbling through.”  Or else I made that up.  I don’t remember.

When I was getting my Master’s degree so I could be a teacher, one professor made us read her favourite book, and then she discussed it endlessly, in a quiet, unbroken monotone.  It was The Reflective Practitioner by Donald Schon.  One point which she hammered home repeatedly was that, no matter the discipline or profession, one thing all professionals have to do is learn how to figure things out “on the fly.” 

This is a part of life.  Things aren’t almost ever going to be as we expect, even if God spoke to us in an actual voice beforehand.  We still find ourselves thrown for a loop and needing to work out what to do, because things aren’t usually what we thought at all. 

In my experience, God seems to make sure of this. In my life, anyway, He wasn’t content with me “simply obeying.”  When it came down to it, I wasn’t apt to disobey, should I feel there was a clear scriptural principle, or something I’d learned to expect from Him personally in my dealings with Him.  But He flat out refused to make my life decisions for me. 

He was like my dad letting go while I was learning to walk, ride a bike, or swim.  God does let go.  So we can grow.  And He does let us fall.  I’ve skinned me a knee or two.  The life that God gives has blood and pain and hurt feelings in it.  And He refuses to “fix” that.