Are there times you find yourself paralyzed with decision-making? Could it be that weighing the pros and cons of an outcome, calculating their risks and ultimately coming to the “best possible decision” might not be the best after all?
Laying aside the more complicated questions like – do I get into a relationship, how do I weigh between choosing one path and another, what job do I choose now…
The simplest example I can think of is when Cliff and I crossed paths. Many adored him, but thought it was a bad idea once he had his first post-transplant liver crisis. Why take the chance to be widowed? Why throw away a career that’s tangibly in your reach?
The metrics tipped away from Cliff.
Going back to a previous suitor- he was brilliant, suave, stellar CV. But while wrestling with God in prayer about him, I dreamt of him entering my home wearing a black mask. Weeks later, his true-to-life mask fell away, and what lay beneath a veneer of gold, was a broken life of unrepentant sin.
Who would have known God would preserve Cliff’s life? Who would have known Cliff would be the right person to travel the world, amongst the poorest of the poor, with me? Who else but him would drop a career, multiple homes, his identity at the drop of a hat to pursue the One who loves him?
God doesn’t do metrics. He does trust and obedience.
“Metrics are great, and a useful means of assessing stewardship of resources, but measuring eternal destinies by temporal formulas is risky business. We just don’t have enough transcendent dimensions in our brains to comprehend the mysterious, sovereign, quantum workings of God that emanate from eternity past for the purposes of His glory for uncertain future. To opine about what God is up to in terms of results, we can stray into the realm of hubris, or faithlessness. If we must see that there are worthy results in order to come to peace about what God has done or allowed, then we have no faith.”
– Ellen Vaughn, “Becoming Elisabeth Elliot”