For the past twenty-eight years, St. Paul’s cornerstone passage about discernment has been a central, guiding text in our work at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. In nearly every gathering we have hosted, we have invited our diverse ecumenical co-learners to dwell together on these words: 

When worshipping communities set out on a program of intentional learning and growth, or when organizational leaders, teachers, and teams of colleagues rethink their professional priorities, there are few better pathways to pursue than this. Start with deep and genuine love for God and neighbour—the dynamic kind of love that abounds or brims over. Nourish it with knowledge and depth of insight from every source of wisdom available, including from co-learners from different cultures, zip codes, and Christian traditions. Then courageously make a decision that aims in the direction of obedience to God and fruitfulness in service, guarding the heart and testing motives to ensure that the decision, and the way it is announced, brings praise to God rather than self. 

Part of the appeal of this text is its parsimony. This pithy, fifty-nine-word prayer challenges all kinds of ways we get discernment wrong. We ground decisions in bitterness or fear rather than love; we settle for nostalgic, sentimental love that doesn’t seek out new learning; we skim along with surface-level facts while failing to search for penetrating insights into what is going on under the surface; we diminish obedience as a central Christian practice while explaining away the divine commands that promise to ground and guide us; we scheme to justify processes that avoid dealing with habitual sin; we buy into speaking habits that downplay rugged, beautiful words like “righteousness”; and we consistently aim to enhance our own glory rather than God’s. Paul resists a lot of folly in a short text! 

Following Paul’s proactive guidance becomes especially life-giving when one is aware of the proactive agency of the Holy Spirit, whether or not the Spirit’s work is perceptible in the moment. While these three verses describe discernment in terms of human agency, throughout Philippians Paul consistently invites us to perceive all our agency as awakened, healed, and guided by God’s agency. These verses about decision-making find their best home in Paul’s larger challenge to “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” even while knowing that “it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose” (Philippians 2:12–13). When Paul testifies, “I can do all this through him who gives me strength” (Philippians 4:13), he is giving us a world-changing script to embrace, inviting us to exert our agency in the full awareness that God is our ever-present helper. 

What a transformative text this can be for us, especially if we learn to talk this way. When confirming a major decision—launching a new initiative, changing jobs, getting married, switching allegiances—it can be illuminating to place that decision in the middle of Paul’s sentence and test it in the presence of wise and gracious friends: 

Some of the most enduring Christian wisdom of a thousand books on making career choices, envisioning new strategic plans, and responding to disruptive change is beautifully conveyed in super-concentrated form in these three verses. Thanks be to God.

Also: Lord, have mercy. 

For while this theo-logic seems more trustworthy to me than ever, the living of it seems more challenging than ever—as does the challenge of passing this wisdom along convincingly to my own dearly loved children and their friends. Shouldn’t making hard decisions get easier as we gain experience over time? Why do these words that have been so central to my own work for so long sometimes feel so inaccessible? 

The longer I stared at a blank screen while trying to complete this article from this point on (over and over and over), the more I felt drawn to dwell on the astonishingly wide range of emotional contexts in which these words of Paul may land. The prompt that prodded me was the swirl of students and faculty around me in an unfamiliar away-from-home university library coffee shop where I am writing this, as well as the frequent interruptions caused by my jumbled email inbox. How would Paul’s words about discernment land amid the furrowed brows gathered at that far table, or the glee in that raucous circle? How would Paul’s words land in the lives of the people who grace today’s email inbox? What if every face in the room and every incoming email opened my heart to yet another way Paul’s words could feel? 

Hurry

Shallow breathing, hurry, frenzy, and panic made an impressive showing in the library today, reminding me that discernment is often demanded when we are on the clock. A student lands in the coffee shop alongside a faculty mentor, asking for advice about how to discern God’s call while explaining that they have three days to decide whether to enter a direction-changing residency. 

At the next table over, a student has that look of someone who has just received a job offer, but from their sixth-choice firm, knowing that they will need to decide whether to accept the offer well before they hear back from choices one through five. It all feels like driving seventy miles per hour on a freeway without GPS, needing to decide whether to take exit 101 only a mile down the road. The car will either exit or not in fifty seconds, firmly setting the trajectory for the journey. And while everyone confesses that God’s purposes will be advanced in any case, some process needs to be engaged in real time to generate a yes or no while the clock is ticking. All high-minded visions of a patient, non-anxious monastic retreat with loving table fellowship for holy friends to participate in a prayer-soaked decision-making process with ever-growing consensus seem more than a little out of touch. 

For all those who need to make weighty decisions quickly in real time, Lord, hear our prayer. 

Poise

At the same time, non-anxious poise and grateful humility also walked into the coffee shop today, as a long-time friend unfolded a fabulous account of an initiative whose success exceeded every human explanation of what was reasonable to hope for. I was reminded of experiencing nearly indescribable joy related to Paul’s words in (of all places) exceptional search-committee processes. The terms “joy,” “discernment,” and “committee” do not intuitively seem to belong to each other, but they have, at times, come together in my experience. 

I will admit to beginning work on every search vividly aware of how they can go wrong. Competing priorities can lead to strife and discord on a search team. Committees can sugar-coat their description of an institution’s weak spots, while candidates sugar-coat their resumés. Everyone has a vague sense that a hard question needs to be asked but can’t quite think of how to phrase it constructively. The best questions come to mind thirty minutes before the final vote, and there is always unfinished business that could later prove to be catastrophic. Promising finalists can end up devastatingly disappointed. Eventual nominees can be set up for failure. Search-team members often stagger across the finish line. 

But when one is vividly aware of all this, experiences of obvious providential leading, growing trust, and emerging consensus truly elicit praise and thanks—even astonishment. When curmudgeonly search-team members express delight, when enthusiasts perceptively name a deep-seated problem, when candidates speak transparently about their successes and disappointments, when runners-up sincerely convey gratitude for all they learned in the process, when finalists look back retrospectively and marvel that a committee managed to recruit them while candidly conveying all the real challenges they would face in the work, it’s like feeling institutional healing taking place, nurturing trust. Hymns of praise become easier to sing in Sunday-morning worship! I look back at these experiences with a vivid awareness of God’s providential agency doing something that none of us had any clue of how to do—and I notice how this same awareness graces my colleagues’ very countenance. 

For all who experience collaborative decision-making as an occasion for joy, thanks be to God. 

Burden 

In the coffee shop today, there are a lot of bent-over shoulders. I can imagine the force of Paul’s injunction to discern landing like a massive millstone, adding to the sense of burden. While noble, it’s all so vexingly effortful: all this loving-learning-discerning-parsing-obeying-fruitbearing-praising. 

This is especially true in light of how many opportunities we have to determine what is best when the consequences truly are weighty. In this university coffee shop, on any given day, people are deciding whether or not to follow Jesus. People are deciding how to honour a parent, how to better respond to their obstinate roommate, how to choose a major, whether to change their mind about matters of consequence. People are animated to debate the best way to exercise, eat, sleep, and budget resources. On top of that, some are being convicted about their own complicit ignorance about what the conflict in Israel and Palestine is really about, or what the sources of poverty really are, or why so many seemingly wonderful Christian people seem bewitched by leaders sporting unbounded racist insinuations. 

Decision fatigue is one thing when we are trying to discern what kind of toothpaste to buy. But when we feel the genuine, urgent call to determine what is best on a host of weighty matters—each urgent and consequential—the burden can feel overwhelming. 

For all who carry heavy burdens of decision-making, Lord, have mercy. 

Godly Sorrow

My email inbox reminds me that proactive discernment often arises out of or leads to godly sorrow. If repentance is a signature Christian practice, then discernment is indispensable. We can’t even get started without discerning our own errors. Nathan challenged David to determine what is best, and the outflow produced the aching words of Psalm 51 that have given generations of believers a script to follow in praying their own godly sorrow. 

I note that it’s my email inbox that reminds me of this, mainly because of how many of my emails use a word that I find to be one of the most haunting words of all: “complicit.” Nearly every email conversation of consequence lately, along with most fundraising campaigns from worthy non-profits, dance around all the ways so many of us are truly complicit in our silence in addressing any number of death-dealing realities: racism, sexual violence, environmental devastation, lack of affordable housing, distorted forms of Christian witness, and more—concerns that should readily transcend political allegiances. 

For me personally, I am learning to see how a cherished Christian practice I have promoted for many years—the practice of singing and praying the biblical Psalms—can too often be misused. When Christian congregations sing the Psalms, particularly the ones that extol God’s grace to Zion, we so often reinforce a kind of Zionism that the Old Testament writers themselves would not have recognized—the kind that neglects widows, orphans, and strangers and weaponizes this inspired poetry to promote genocide. Have I done enough to clarify the kinds of Psalm-singing that hinder versus align with divine commands? I think not. 

For each of us whose consciences are pricked in the struggles of discernment, Lord, have mercy. 

Confusion

The word I most overhear in the coffee line today is “confused.” We are a bunch of baffled, perplexed, and bewildered people awaiting our java. 

Is it just me, or is it true that most books and articles about discernment and decision-making seem to privilege stories with confident endings? “I didn’t know which job to take, but then a mentor spoke a decisive word and the path became clear.” “I read one book in seminary describing four views about [fill in controversial topic], and the clarity of God’s Word broke in and convinced me beyond all doubt that view number three was correct.” 

I am not sure any word fully conveys the flummox of arriving at a decision point of great consequence and realizing that the evidence for or against a given decision is murky at best. Or perhaps the outcome of a decision-making process seems clear to us, but the timing seems entirely unclear. I will confess that when Paul advises the Romans about what to do when differences of opinion arise on matters of secondary importance—“let each be convinced in their own mind” (Romans 14:5)—my mind goes to those moments in the voting booth—in a faculty meeting, church meeting, state-wide election, or family chat—when I was entirely unsure about what to do. How exactly are we supposed to manage when we aren’t convinced one way or the other? What happens when even people of great courage and conviction, not usually given to indecision, truly are puzzled? 

For all who see through a glass darkly and long for clarity of vision, Lord, have mercy. 

Excitement

And then there are the effervescent tables of conversation here today—all the tables that may well end up photographed for university admissions brochures. In some cases, even when trying not to overhear a conversation, the excitement breaks through: “I turned down the job and decided to go into the Peace Corps!” “We are so excited to invite you to our wedding!” “We found a new leader for our student organization.” “I’m giving up my tedious job and joining the team at a remarkable summer camp.” “I am excited to announce that I finally decided to major in . . . philosophy!” (my favorite). For all the indecision, all the despair, and all the existential angst walking around a college campus, joys also abound. I never tire of the genuine excitement of it. 

For everyone whose excitement in announcing a decision so clearly emerges out of love, is informed by keen insight, and points to fruitfulness and service, thanks be to God. 

Despair

Back to email. Today’s inbox brings me news of four pilgrims walking through a cancer-tinged valley of shadows. Each of them and their loved ones confront a host of massive decisions. Decisions on a course of treatment need to be made when no one in the room has had enough sleep. Add to that the burden of deciding what to say about it on social media, plus managing all the hospital bills and logistics of the journey. I marvel at the grace, stamina, and response of many loved ones of those suffering, who not only manage all this but also respond discerningly to members of their own family who each have such different needs in the context of a shared travesty. 

For all who are determining what is best in the middle of debilitating despair, Lord, have mercy.

Once this litany of praise and petition got rolling, it was not easy to stop. Toward the end of my writing blitz, I landed on several comprehensive lists of emotions categorized by research psychologists, some with well over a hundred discrete emotions, and it dawned on me anew that exemplary practices of discernment could feel a lot like almost any of them. Discernment can be prompted by travail or opportunity. Discernment can feel like carrying a millstone or like feeling gentle winds propelling a sailboat over the ripples of a sunbathed bay. Discernment can elicit confession of sin as well as overflowing gratitude. 

With all these vastly different emotional contexts in mind, it was instructive to reread Philippians and notice afresh just how acutely aware of emotion Paul himself was. As Philippians unfolds, Paul cherishes fearlessness (1:14); laments envy, rivalry, and selfish ambition (1:15–17; 2:3); cautions against grumbling (2:14); notes his own anxiety (2:28) and grief (3:18); invites experiences of great joy (2:29; 3:1; 4:4); challenges resistance to debilitating discord (4:2); and stretches to describe a peace that surpasses understanding (4:7) and contentment that can’t be contained in words (4:11). It’s hard to imagine any piece of ancient literature with more trenchant descriptions of such varied emotions in such a succinct text. I feel chastened for lifting out just three verses from all this churn. 

One of the marvels of the Psalms is that they are, as John Calvin once said, the “anatomy of the soul.” The Bible’s 150 psalms feature resonances with nearly every situation in life, every Enneagram type, every part of the emotional landscape of Christian life. What if we learned to understand Paul and Paul’s advice in this way too, supplanting our dispassionate pastoral advice with testimonies about the stunning variety of affections that may well accompany faithful decision-making, however rushed it may need to be? 

I have long thought that one of the wisest moves in the early history of the church was to land on a liturgy that started with two opening prayers: “Lord, have mercy” and “Glory be to God.” Lament and confession juxtaposed with thanks and praise—a liturgical outworking of “the wonder and the woundedness of life this side of the veil” embraced in the Manifesto that guides the journal you are now reading. May God give us grace to be faithful in the wonder and woundedness, ever aware that we, too, can do mighty things through the one who strengthens us.