When God Speaks (Part 2)
In my last post, I wrote about ways we can decipher between harmful delusions and the voice of God. Since writing that post, I’ve thought more about ways that these spiritual delusions can cause harm, specifically when they give us a false sense of control over our life circumstances.
We’ve all heard the stories. A woman who feels like her family is incomplete with her 5 girls, gets pregnant again because she has a prompting that the next will be a boy, all to find out the 6th is also a girl. A sick family member is blessed that she will be healed through the power of the priesthood but she still dies. A family moves across the country because they are prompted they will find a good job there but they never do and end up moving back.
These are the kinds of stories shared in general conference addresses and sacrament meeting talks framed not as failures of faith or misguided spiritual promptings, but as the opposite- an opportunity for humility and learning. And while that might be the case (I’m sure the people in these stories had to have humility to follow through with these promptings), I worry that we jump too quickly to the “make it make sense” stage and forget that there is real grief and real hardship when promptings don’t work out how we expected.
The idea of a “spiritual prompting” adds weight to any given decision we might make. If I said to myself, “I’m headed to the donut shop because I’m craving a chocolate donut with sprinkles” but it turned out the donut shop was out of sprinkles, I’d shrug my shoulders and say “oh well.” and move on with my day. But if I said to myself “I’m headed to the donut shop because the spirit told me to eat a chocolate donut with sprinkles”- now I have to reconcile the fact that the donut shop is out of sprinkles with the “prompting” I received. It adds an entire extra level of mental energy and processing- and grief. Because not only do I not get to eat a donut, now I have to figure out why God told me to get a donut when He must’ve known they didn’t have the sprinkles.
There is grief and difficulty in the added loss of control promptings can bring. We can logically accept that we don’t control the gender of our baby or whether someone is healed, but when we believe that God has told us through the Spirit that things will turn out a specific way, it’s that much harder when they don’t. We are left to question “Did I interpret my prompting incorrectly?” or “Was there something else God needed me to learn from this?” or “Did I not have enough faith?” or “How will this situation be perceived by others that know about this prompting?” Having these kinds of questions on top of the grief and hardship we are already experiencing drains the mental energy we have available to cope with it all.
My proposal to combat the added emotional weight that comes with unfulfilled promptings is to stop making life decisions based on what you believe God is telling you to do. This might seem like a radical take, but hear me out. Instead of making the decision based on the prompting and putting the weight of the decision on God, use the Spirit to help you take ownership over your own choice. Let the Spirit guide you to be confident, do your research, access your resources, and then make the well-informed, peace-driven choice and accept the consequences as they come. Take ownership of the choice as yours, an imperfect human, and use God and the Spirit as your supports to help you get through it. If the baby turns out to be a boy when you hoped for a girl, you can rest easy in the knowledge that you made the choice based on what felt best for you- God didn’t make that choice. If the job doesn’t work out, you can know that God still has your back regardless.
When we allow for the choice to be ours and not Gods’, we expand the Spirit’s opportunity to speak to us and help us through it. When we place the weight of the decision on the Spirit’s promptings, we set ourselves up for complicated questions, doubt, and difficult feelings about something that was never in our control to begin with.
