No Idea: Entrusting Your Journey to a God Who Knows

by Greg Garrett

And then something came to me that felt like an answer. As gently and as honestly as I could, I said, “I think you’re right. History is full of people who never stopped being evil. But I can think of one person who was changed from darkness to light. Me.” For although I never murdered the innocents, robbed banks, or stole Social Security checks from great-grandmothers, during that long stretch of my life when I was in the throes of deep and life-threatening depression, I hurt other people—often the people I loved most—with my selfishness, my anger, my inability to look outside my own suffering, my conscious decision to pursue my own will. I was not entirely under my own control, the bus didn’t always turn when I turned the wheel, but there’s no denying that it had been a disastrous life with me at the controls. And while I hope and pray that I also

helped some people along the way, during that time, I lost three marriages, I lost the chance to be a part of my sons’ daily lives, and I spread rage, guilt, and shame around me like a water sprinkler turned up high. But in the early years of this millennium, when it became clear that I was not going to get any better physically, emotionally, or spiritually pursuing my own wisdom, when it seemed that the only path out of the pain I was inflicting and suffering seemed to be to leave this life altogether, I suddenly experienced this momentous and, some would say, miraculous, change when I gave up, when I stopped trying to do what I wanted and tried to do what I believe God wanted. This was a shock to me because not only had I not been a very religious person for some years, I actually wanted to have very little to do with formal religion.

when people claim God is talking to them, He often seems to be telling them to do what they already planned to do anyway. It’s rare, in fact, that this God of contemporary dreams and visions comes to us and asks us to go against the grain, against our self-interests, to do what makes us uncomfortable. And yet if the God talking to us is the God I know from the Bible and personal experience, that seems to

be what He most often wants.

During the dark years when I wrestled with depression and suicidal thoughts, death didn’t scare me—a moment’s pain, then peace. That was all. What scared me were the numberless hard hours of living stretching out in front of me. Living is harder than dying.

But I’m not troubled by their work because I think it’s bad art, although I do often think that; I’m troubled because it does not encompass all of God’s reality, because in editing out the difficult, it ignores the central and simple fact

that all of life, good and bad, the rainbow and the dust storm, are part of God’s creation. Augustine wrestled with the fact that so much of the world seemed somehow imperfect; how then could it come from a perfect God? Yet, at the climax of his Confessions, he acknowledges that all is from God, and that nothing God made can be bad: “We see that everything is good which in any degree has being, because it derives from him who has being in no degree at all, but is simply He Is.”1

I’m especially drawn to the figure of that same Moses of Scetis. Often insulted by bigoted brothers who lived around him, Moses let their words slide off him, and his response of forgiveness is powerful. Once, called to come and help the others in the community judge a brother who had sinned, he filled a leaky jug with water, slung it over his shoulder, and set off for the meeting.

he was doing. “My own sins leak out all around and I cannot even see them,” he said, “yet now you invite me to judge the sins of another.” And the tradition tells us, his brothers got the message, and instead of rebuking the wayward brother or casting him out of the community, they forgave him.

He wasn’t quite ready. “Could you pray for me?” he asked. “Since you’re almost like a pastor and all.” And that’s where things got personal. Because you can give some money to someone, pay them off, make them into a simple transaction. But when you pray for someone, you have to see them as a human being, someone with needs and hopes, someone beloved by God. And so, I prayed.

Because too many times we wait to do what we’re supposed to be doing because we think the time isn’t right, because some life milestone hasn’t shown up yet. We wait our whole lives for the right time to live—and if we’re not careful, we might look up and find ourselves out of chances.

should know: I waited to live while I was in high school because I thought I wouldn’t really start living until I was in college. I waited to live in college and in grad school because I thought I wouldn’t really start living until I got a degree, got a job, achieved some sort of mythical success. I could go on waiting, I suppose, because I was waiting to see if someone would make me a card-carrying member of the clergy. But I decided that day—and I’m reaffirming that choice now—that I know what I’ve been called to do. I’ve been called to listen for the will of God, to try to follow it.