After Abram followed his father north, this mistake—as we’d probably label it—did not prevent him from later heading southwest to pursue his calling. All too easily we get hooked up on an idea of a right and wrong path that does not seem to be how God views life.
When God calls Abram in Haran, he does not chastise Abram for travelling north, tell him he’s been wasting his time, nor inform him he should have prayed or fasted more before making such a foolish decision. Instead, it's when Abram's dream of the land of Canaan looks to have died that God reignites it.
Stop-offs in Haran are not mistakes but opportunities for us to learn more about who we are and who God is.
When we find ourselves stalled or at a dead-end, “Go to/towards yourself to the land I will show you” (Gen. 12:1) is a promise that God will continuously step in to remind us of where we want to be.
This is why God is not afraid of the decisions we make or the places we end up in. He knows that whatever happens, he can take action to reveal another glimpse of the better future we dream of.
God will show us.
The question that plagues those of us seeking guidance is: how on earth does he do this?
We're going to get practical in a moment, but first we need to squash the popular notion that God does this similarly to how traffic lights control vehicle flow.
"Traffic-light" guidance
Many Christians believe God guides us using a "traffic-light" system where he provides us with signals for when to move forward, pause, or slam on the brakes in our lives.
Red is God's no.
Amber is God telling us to wait.
Green is God's yes.
There are many things wrong with thinking that God guides us in this way. Here are just four to consider.
1. We still struggle to hear from God
This approach to guidance is as simplistic as it gets. You quieten yourself in prayer, seek God's promises in Scripture, and listen to the Holy Spirit prompting you in one of three ways: red, amber, or green. No, wait, or yes.
And yet, all of us have stories about seeking guidance from God and how hard it is to discern a simple, single word from him.
If it's so hard to hear from God using such a simplistic approach, we have to question whether a no, wait, or yes are the answers he wants to give us.
2. It fosters a poor relationship with God
Imagine if a family member, friend, or colleague asked you for advice about their future but insisted you could only respond with a no, wait, or yes.
How would you feel?
What kind of relationship would this foster?
When someone asks me for advice about their future, I want to ask them questions about their life and interests and discuss with them what opportunities or alternatives could exist depending on their decision. I would feel honoured to chat with them about such an important decision, but I would feel the opposite if I could only offer a single word.
I don't even think I would reply if my responses were limited because I would assume the person asking was trying to defer the decision to me or was looking for confirmation bias.
Perhaps that's why God doesn't respond when we limit his answers. He doesn't appreciate being treated like a sat-nav any more than we do.
3. It creates anxiety
The "traffic-light" approach is so prevalent within our churches and literature because many of us believe God has a hidden and often perfect plan for our lives. We only require him to give us a yes, no, or wait to keep us on the right path when the future is already fully marked out.
But why on earth would God hide the trajectory of our lives from us when doing so robs us of our willingness to take risks and leaves us in agonising indecision, afraid that we'll fall out of his will? God's perfect love drives out fear (see 1 John 4:18); it doesn't create fear through withholding a secret path for us to discover.
Our lives will nearly always stall when our desire to pursue God wholeheartedly translates into a refusal to act until we are certain—or as next-to-certain as we can be—that he's given us approval.
4. We hate being micromanaged
Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan are behavioural researchers who have spent decades exploring the how and why of what motivates us. They have found that people are motivated from within just as much, or even more, than by external factors or rewards. They call this Self-Determination Theory.
In a nutshell, they believe each of us has three innate psychological needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy. Competence is about wanting to do things well; relatedness is about our desire to connect with others; and autonomy is about having a sense of freedom over our own actions and values. When we satisfy these three drives, we become self-motivated, productive, and happy.
The irony of our "traffic-light" model of guidance is that it questions our competence to choose well, causes us to resent our relationship with God, and negates our autonomy by leaving us without a real say in the direction our lives take. It thwarts all three of our ingrained drives.
We become unmotivated, unproductive, and unhappy when we are micro-managed by humans in this way, and we utterly resent leaders who treat us like children by constantly telling us what to do and how.
So why do we want God to relate to us like this?
And why would God want to?
When does God call us?
In last week's article, Called when stalled, I talked about how God doesn't intervene in Abram's life until he settles down in Haran. It's only once Abram settles for something less than his dream that God calls him to move on.
But there's another aspect of when God calls us that I didn't mention last week. He also makes a habit of guiding us when we're outside of a religious setting or not taking part in a religious activity like prayer or fasting.
God calls Jacob while he’s setting up his tent for the night, and Saul while he is chasing a donkey. David was tending sheep, while Elisha was leading oxen across a field. Jesus calls Matthew while he’s collecting people’s taxes, and he calls Nathanael while he’s sitting in the shade of a fig tree.
The people God calls are nearly always doing something mundane, ordinary, or (in Matthew's case at least) something boring.
Whatever Abram was doing, it was so irrelevant it didn’t even get mentioned. Given how he worshipped other gods at the time, I think we can safely conclude he wasn't praying. At least not to God.
Called when... not praying
Our issue when we approach God for guidance is that we embrace religion. We suddenly take up fasting, and we fall to our knees with an intensity that rarely reflects our normal prayer posture or rhythm. There's something about life-changing decisions that drives us to carve out time for God in ways we often struggle or neglect to do on a day-to-day basis.
And yet, the very things we think we should be doing more of to receive guidance from God—praying, fasting, and reading Scripture—are rarely the things the Bible portrays people doing when God intervenes in their lives.
The thing about adopting a posture of knees bent, eyes closed, and hands together when we pray is that we also embrace any religious beliefs and attitudes we hold, too.
We end up striving for an answer.
Called when... doing ordinary things
But God initiates in the unguarded, ordinary, everyday moments of our lives for three reasons.
First, guidance is a gift rather than something to be earned through religious activity. Second, God guides us through the Holy Spirit by reawakening an internal desire rather than by giving us an external answer like the yes, no, or wait of the "traffic-light" system. Third, our spirit is often more attuned to the desires of our heart outside of religious activity.
We often miss God's guidance because it's in the unexpected moments of our lives that he speaks to us rather than in our mammoth prayer and fasting sessions.
It's while we're washing the dishes, changing a nappy, chatting with a friend, running along a street, struggling through a dull day at the office, watching the credits roll at the end a movie, or taking in the beauty of God's creation.
It's when we're not subconsciously trying to fit what religion tells us we should be doing that our awareness of God's call and of the desires of our heart increases.
We can then more clearly identify the impression, the sense, the seemed good that the Holy Spirit ignites within us of there being something more we are called to do and be.
But what does a seemed good feel like?
It’s a feeling of holy dissatisfaction with your life that lets you know you're missing out on something better. It’s holy because it is not a regretful feeling that focuses upon your failures or mistakes. Instead, it inspires hope that a different life you’ve imagined is possible.
It’s like that feeling of homesickness you get when you are far from home and something deep inside of you longs to be back. Your current pursuits do not feel like where you are supposed to be, while God’s call feels like somewhere you belong and feel at home.
Seemed good feels like you are pregnant with an idea that's ready to be birthed. Or it feels like a fire burning inside of you that you can no longer contain. Or it feels like a nagging thought that won’t go away. Sometimes God’s call is a sense of something you just can’t hold inside anymore.
It can be a lightbulb moment that cuts through our despair, sadness, and disengagement and causes us to see something we haven’t seen before. We gain a new thought, a fresh idea, or a different perspective, and our world shifts with this unexpected revelation. We suddenly view things completely differently.
Or it’s a quiet whisper that affirms that this is who you are meant to be. This is what you were created to do. Despite the hardness of whatever it is, it leaves you with a deep sense of fulfilment, purpose, and joy that overflows into the other areas of your life.
The Holy Spirit and us
I may be overdoing the analogies, but in my experience, we rarely get practical enough when we talk about how God communicates with us today. Many of us will have had moments like I’ve just described but discounted them as our own voice.
The thing is, we over-spiritualise guidance while under-spiritualising it at the same time. We set aside vast amounts of time and energy to pray about the future whilst ignoring our own desires and the spiritual promptings we regularly experience outside of "prayer times."
We don't realise that the Holy Spirit manifests in our unguarded moments by highlighting what's already within us.
Praying takes on a new focus
Once we resonate with the idea that God’s call is loudest in life's unexpected and ordinary moments, devoting time to pray about the future takes on a new purpose. Where before it was all about getting on our knees to ask—almost beg—for a divine sign, it now becomes about exploring a growing Holy Spirit revelation of who we are and the dreams God has planted within us.
“Go to/towards yourself to the land I will show you.”
When we no longer need precise direction, guiding prayer instantly stops being a paralysing quest to hear a yes, no, or a wait and becomes far more relational. Like Abram, this is because we know what we dream of and roughly the direction we need to go.
Knowing our dreams frees us from indecision and gives our lives new focus. We may not end up leaving immediately like Abram did, but we can live more intentionally as we become aware of what things may help us move toward making our dreams reality.
“Go to/towards yourself to the land I will show you.”
I will show you is God's promise to call out to us when a choice doesn't work out, we lose focus, settle for something less, or get lost in grief along the way. We don't need to do anything to earn or receive this call, for God is the initiator of guidance.
God calls out to us in order to restore our dreams and show us how he made us for something more.