No Idea: Entrusting Your Journey to a God Who Knows

by Greg Garrett

For one of the first times in my adult life, I was experiencing joy, real out-of-the-box joy.

Jesus is tempted with material things, with power, and with glory, but He passes the tests (every test, the Scriptures tell us) with flying colors. In His responses, Jesus reveals that if life isn’t centered in and on God, it’s not life at all, and He walks out of the wilderness and back into the world, knowing at last who He is and what He’s called to do.

But Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who gave his life in the struggle against Hitler, observed that most people ignore the call or act as if only Professional Christians need to pay attention to it, that a simple belief in God and God’s saving grace is enough. Bonhoeffer’s famous term for the belief that many Christians have about their lives in God is “cheap grace,” a belief that God’s grace will cover their transgressions and wrongdoings without requiring any effort on their part.

what God actually offered was “costly grace,” grace offered only within a life of service and faithfulness: “Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.”

Bonhoeffer argued that this setting apart of professional religious people ignores the fact that all of us are called to discipleship, and that the real lesson of Martin Luther’s reforms was that for most of us, the way we are called to follow Jesus is not in convents or cloisters, but in our everyday lives.

I do believe that following Jesus—discipleship, as Bonhoeffer called it—is the task of everyone who wants to call herself or himself a Christian, and that’s the path that I’m trying to walk in this life I never expected to have.

what does it mean to say I am trying to do what God wants of me?

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Thomas Merton

Diana Butler Bass notes that in discernment, we seek the answer to three fundamental questions: “Who am I? What does God want me to do with my life? How can I be true to both myself and God?”

Once you’ve decided that you’re going to live—no mean feat for some of us—how do you figure out what you’re supposed to do with that life?

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.

But as Diana Butler Bass says, discernment is “a kind of spiritual compass, helping us negotiate the unfamiliar territory of our truest selves.”2 It doesn’t ask what we want to do; it asks what God wants us to do, and whether we are capable of doing it—and willing to do it.

First: When we are serious about discernment I think we are called to do something radical and countercultural: We are called to get out of the way.

autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, I never knew true freedom until I renounced control over my life and handed it over to God.

If you love God completely and totally, if your values are God-values, then the choices you make will tend to be in tune with His will for your life.

Second: Pray. This seems so obvious, but it isn’t always, because we think we know what we want—or should want—to do. Or because others have put their desires on us or convinced us that we should want what they want for us.

Pray at all times and in all things. Develop a regular prayer life, one not just centered around emergencies. Develop a discipline of prayer—perhaps morning and evening, if not more often.

Offer up all you do as a prayer in addition to directing prayer at odd times.

Third: Use the good mind that God has given you.

You are the person you are, with the strengths, weaknesses, interests, and passions you have at this moment. Why imagine that God is going to miraculously intervene in the natural order just because you think you want to do something?

Open doors. Not locked ones. So, in short: Pay attention. Choose wisely. Know when something is possible and when something—a relationship, a vocation, a move, a desire—is clearly off the table. And if something looks impossible, maybe that’s because it is.

Fourth: Be aware.

Read the Scriptures. A lot of them. Don’t just pick a verse you like or a passage that agrees with you. Proof texting is as bad a practice in discernment as it is in theology; read whole stories. See if God might be speaking to you in Zephaniah. See if the parables of Jesus have a bearing in your life.

Listen to other people. Not too much; just enough.

Listen to the world. In my tradition, we believe in an immanent God, a God who created the earth and was willing to die for it. If God is moving in the world, perhaps He is speaking through it as well.

Fifth: We discern in community, especially in faith communities.

To ask God’s will for our lives is often to ask the path of our service to God, to others, and to the earth we live on. A countercultural community is more likely to be open to the idea of service and commitment than a secular community.

Ubuntu means, Tutu explained, that “a person is a person through other persons. It is not, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ It is rather, ‘I am human because I belong. I participate. I share.’”

Finally: Parker Palmer (who by now you’ve guessed is one of my discernment gurus) writes that when we are doing what we are supposed to be doing, we will know it because we will be energized by it, joyful in it.

And if you are doing even the most worthy of things, but it breaks you down instead of building you up, you may need to take notice.

You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always.5

But that’s what faith is all about. Not a naive belief that God is going to give me what I want. Instead, it’s my own resolve to go on believing and trusting, and to keep my feet moving on the path, so that up around the next bend or over the next rise, maybe what God has in store for me will come into view.

The mistakes I’ve made—and they’ve run the gamut from relational to financial to professional to spiritual—have taught me that it’s hard to live your life well when you don’t pay attention to it, and even harder when you ignore the idea that there might be a plan for it.

Mistake Number One: I learned (or at least, began to learn) that you shouldn’t make decisions simply out of embarrassment, shame, or fear of being voted off the island.

Frank Sinatra sang, “Love is lovelier the second time around,”1 and I can vouch for the fact that second love can begin hopefully, especially if you think your only problem was in who you chose the first time. Choose more wisely, and things will be better this time—that makes sense, right?

Or so I thought.

Mistake Number Two: The grass is not always greener. You know this. But judging from the way I and other people have lived our lives, it’s a common belief that you can choose a different place, a different job, a different church, a different relationship, and that new choice is all it’ll take to make us happy.

I know now that everything worth having in life—including relationships, including a fully realized self—requires hard work.

Mistake Number Three: Almost everything our culture teaches us about love is that one person can fix us—or complete us, to quote Jerry Maguire.

St. Augustine, who, like me, had his adventures in the first part of his life, came to understand that what we’re ultimately looking for is a relationship with God: “You have made us and drawn us to yourself,” he wrote, speaking of God, “and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.”3

I trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the LORD, because he has dealt bountifully with me. (Ps. 13:5–6)

I know and love a number of gay and lesbian people, and whether you think of homosexuality as a cardinal sin, a regular sin, or no sin at all in the right circumstances, I think all of us can agree that God loves everyone, gay and straight, male and female, red and yellow, black and white.

Someone has written that hatred is like drinking a cup of poison and waiting for the person you hate to keel over. Hatred doesn’t harm the person you hate, at least not in any way like the havoc it wreaks on you.

a wise man in Cormac McCarthy’s novel Cities of the Plain explains, “Our enemies … seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that the man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him.”

Everything that happens is an opportunity for wisdom and growth, even those things that cause us pain. And everything that happens offers us the opportunity to be grateful for the entirety of life, for the good and the bad.

This is who I am, and these mistakes in this life God has given me have led me to the point where I think I am finally becoming the person God wants me to be. Perhaps folks with greater wisdom and more discernment might get to this point without all the heartache and bad juju—at

First, in my experience, there’s no point in telling stories until you can see their entire shape, or something close to it—until then, they are simply puzzling things that happened, like the people of Nineveh putting sackcloth on goats and donkeys, as we’re told they did after the Hebrew prophet Jonah came to tell them God was planning to destroy their city.

“Endings are the most important part of stories. They grow inevitably from the stories themselves. The ending of a story only seems inevitable, though, after it’s over and you’re looking back, as I am now.”1

Second, I’m not completely sure how much to trust this experience, and the simple fact that I even had it freaks me out more than a little. I fear it might mark me in some minds as delusional, maybe psychotic, neither of which bodes well for my future employment.

A hallucination is meaningless, she says, gibberish. But “a vision can have theological content and convey a message from God to the person.”3 Maybe so. But I wasn’t so sure I could tell the difference. Some of what I thought might be holy visions turned out to be selfish telegrams from the id.

I couldn’t help remembering that God called the prophet Jonah to go to Nineveh, the greatest city of the Assyrians, the most powerful enemies of the people of Israel. Although I did not yet know the word exegesis, I understood that a call to Nineveh meant a call to follow God that would take me out of my comfort zone—wherever that might be—a call that would embarrass and unsettle me, a call to radical faith.