Mark Labberton:
I am really delighted today to welcome back to Conversing the Reverend Dr. Angela Gorrell. Angela is a speaker and author and her new book, Braving Difficult Decisions, What To Do When You Don’t Know What To Do, is going to be the focus of our conversation.
She’s taught at several schools, including Yale University, Baylor University, Fuller Theological Seminary, and McCormick Seminary. And her research has been highlighted in popular publications such as The New York Times, NPR, and the Washington Post. Angela, it’s so great to have you back and I look forward to discussing your new book.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I’m really delighted to dive into conversation with you today. It is an honour. Thank you.
Mark Labberton:
When I interviewed you a while back about your book, Gravity of Joy, I was so taken with it and taken with your writing style as well as with the thoughtfulness with which you’re told about deep and profound pain in your life. This book that we’re going to be talking about today circles around some further things that have occurred to you, but it also is a very different book than the earlier one.
The title, again, is Braving Difficult Decisions, What To Do When You Don’t Know What to Do. I think it’s sort of fun to think of all the different ways that you can emphasize words in that subtitle, especially what to do when you don’t know what to do. So let’s just jump in as often conversations like this begin with. How did you come to this book? How did it come to happen?
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Yeah, I think that there’s always a liminal space that we find ourselves in, or oftentimes in our lives we come to a crossroads. We have some sort of internal or external conflict that we’re grappling with. We go through a crucible experience. That’s what my family went through when I wrote The Gravity of Joy, or I wrote that book in light of those experiences.
And so then we find ourselves in this liminal space where we need to figure out where to go next. And sometimes in the waiting, most times in the waiting, we can feel paralyzed. We can feel sort of overwhelmed. Like where do I turn? What do I do next? And so I wanted to write a book that spoke to that liminal space that so often us as individuals or as communities of people as an organisation find ourselves in.
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
And I read a lot of books, so I was making my own difficult decisions in my life. And specifically one that I can talk about right now is this decision to whether to leave my job as a professor right before going up for tenure or to stay and to go up for tenure. And tenures are really, it’s a process where, as a professor for those listening that may not be familiar with the academy, it’s one of the biggest promotions that you have as a professor. It takes a tremendous amount of work. You have to create lots of documents. And I was keeping a file for it, but the closer I got to it, I was about eight months out, I started to hear that quiet voice within me that was like, I don’t know if this is for you. Specifically this and this place and this time. And it’s a disorienting thing to have something might happen when for so many of us, we might hear a word like promotion and think, “Of course.”
So I went on this eight month discernment journey, and it involved reading other people’s books. And many of them I found to be quite helpful. And at the same time, several of them felt a little bit esoteric. It was as if it was kind of elusive what I was supposed to do. It was then I found myself reading, oh, this is an interesting, yeah, this is a part of discernment. This is a good practice. Oh, this is a good idea.
And I found myself wanting to integrate all of them into a journey for someone that’s kind of a step-by-step, like, you could do this and then try this. And so I was like, if I were to write a book like that, what would that look like? And then I also read a lot of autobiographies and biographies of people who have made complex choices.
And I was really inspired by these exemplars throughout history. And so, I braided together my research on discernment with these exemplars throughout history. And it starts with Perpetua. And I mean, it goes all the way back to Perpetua and Felicity, which I believe is the 1100s to now. And so there’s covers of breadth of people from all different kinds of traditions.
And then I also decided as a practical theologian, as a practical theologian, by the way, I would describe my job. Some people are like, what’s a practical theologian? I think of my work as thinking one about the relationship between culture and the church about society. How does religion work out in practice? And then how do we do that better over time? But also, how does religion come to impact people’s everyday lives?
And so, I decided as a practical theologian to interview 15 people I think that had made difficult decisions recently, and seven of their stories appear in the book. And so I braided together these three major strands of research to create a journey that I hoped would inspire people by the exemplars in the book, that would be practical for people by the stories that are in the book, but also doable for people by integrating these different aspects of discernment.
Mark Labberton:
Well, it comes through loud and clear, and it’s the richness of the book, I think I said about Gravity of Joy. And I want to say again about this, that it strikes me as being both a book that works at a very practical, clear, straightforward level. And it also works at a much more liminal level, where you’re raising questions that are anything but easy to answer, where the issues and nuances of how one actually comes to understand themselves in the process of decision-making, as well as how they come to understand the context in which the decision needs to be made, how they respond to the consequences intended and unintended consequences of decision-making. It’s just a very, very fascinating topic.
And because all of us are decision-makers, part of being human in particular is a sophisticated capacity for decision-making. And it is both one of our great joys and glories and amazing wonders about being human. And it’s also one of the places that exposes all of our vulnerability and all of our pain and all of our, sort of messed up qualities of life that are all woven together.
And I just think you capture that dynamic in the book. It lands solidly. Like, this is a person that really understands the kind of decision-making world that I live in. That was true for me personally, but it’s also true. I’m sure for many other readers who would find the book would just land on a lot of different levels.
I do want to start by acknowledging that maybe different lenses that we could consider the book through. So one is individual decision-making, which is clearly a significant piece of this, but I know that you also wrote it for the sake of communities in decision-making together.
But I also want to raise another level, which I’ll just call more maybe the cultural level, which is the moment that we live in right now, where it feels to me like so many people feel greatly impaired about decisions that they can’t even quite frame. Because the cultural moment, the social moment, the political moment, the economic moment, feels so fraught and heavy laden that to try to even figure out, what is the decision that I think I could make and what decision could I make that would actually help my life in this often very fearful and perplexing time.
So let’s start with just the individual level. In both of the two books, Gravity of Joy and Brave and Difficult Decisions, there’s a great deal of your own personal story that’s in the book that was true in the first book, and it’s certainly true in this one. Just give the readers who haven’t, the potential readers who are listening to this, a potential frame for understanding how you came as an individual into the thicket really of decision-making in some pretty serious and very, very difficult ways.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Yeah, I found myself in the summer of 2020, and first of all, I want to say your words were incredibly generous. And so thank you so much for seeing this book in this way, both my books, and for believing that they can be helpful. I don’t know that there’s any greater thing that you can hear as an author, so thank you so much.
Mark Labberton:
Sure.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Yeah. I found myself like so many of us. So the Gravity of Joy is, it lands right in the middle of, I was studying joy at Yale and I was teaching a class called Life Worth Living. And to this day, I teach life worth living. I train educators to teach life worth living journeys. I lead them myself all the time, retreats and such.
And this question of, what is a life worth living? How do I live open to joy in a suffering world? I attended to very clearly in the gravity of joy, in the sense of, I said, I want to live open to joy. This is what it looks like in a suffering world, and I want to seek the life worth living. And one of the questions felt very urgent to me during that time, and that’s, can I be suffering and my life still be good?
But then of course, I continued to teach that and to live that journey myself. And then in 2020, we have the pandemic. It’s just started to happen in March. And I find myself in the summer of 2020 continuing to ask these questions of myself. What should I hope for? What does it mean to lead my life? Well, what is a flourishing life? What does it take to lead a meaningful life? And really this desire to not just teach or guide others in this journey, but to live it myself, my own, to live with my answers.
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Set me on a journey toward these questions that I address in brave and difficult decisions. Do I stay at this university and get tenure at this university? Do I stay in this marriage that is not going well? It’s hurting and it’s hard. I don’t want to go into all the details of that marriage because I don’t know that it helps anyone, except to say that I think to be a professional Christian, which is how I would see myself to preach, to teach, to be a spiritual guide, and then to grapple with this question. It was heartbreaking. Really, really heartbreaking.
And so many people that are not spiritual guides, but deeply spiritual people feel that. And there’s also Mark, there’s very few books out there that really help people to make this kind of decision from a spiritual place in their life. There’s books for what to do after it. There’s books about how to stay when it’s hard. I really struggled to find a book that was like, you can be deeply Christian, deeply spiritual and make this very difficult choice. And so, I also was looking for that. So these practices of discernment that I integrate into braving difficult decisions, I lived them and then I wrote them.
I think that both as a practical theologian, but really just as a human who loves to write, I don’t know any other way to write a book. I think you have to live some of the things that you’re, I mean, you have to put them in your own heart and soul. You have to grapple with these ideas, and then you write them. So this journey of braving difficult decisions both started in a personal way in 2020, but even before that, because like I said, I was really writing about how to live open to joy, what is the life worth living. And then this journey came out of that. Yeah.
Mark Labberton:
Well, it’s interesting that decisions, unlike circumstances like you’ve described in Gravity of Joy, which are circumstances that cause death, whether it’s disease or accidents or all kinds of ways that tragedy can befall us, typically those things aren’t necessarily because of decisions we’ve made. It can happen just because of living into the real world where painful things happen.
But when it comes to the decisions, sometimes in the midst of that, but also beyond such times as that, we are really making, we are facing the difficulty that we could try to avoid. And a lot of people do, understandably, all of us do, at times, choose to avoid making decisions because we think somehow it will be better for everyone if we just move on rather than actually make a decision. But in this case, you’re really grasping the nettle of an acknowledgment of pain, challenges, mystery, uncertainty, the gravity of what you’re doing, the implications again of what you’re doing. And you’re trying as an individual in community to discern how you hold those things and move toward them.
Where you’re going to choose as an act of free will to discern, and then act on something that may most clearly only really exist in your own heart and mind, right? No one else can be inside the circumstances that you’re describing in both cases, inside a marriage or inside a job decision like the one that you made. The systems around those things don’t encourage your individuality, but the reality you’re underscoring is, in the midst of the system, there’s a place for the individual and for the discernment that an individual can actually exercise and act on.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Yeah. And I would say that to not make a decision is to make one as well.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
That you’re, if you make no decision to change something, you’ve made a decision.
And I do want to underscore that this book is not a journey toward making a particular kind of decision. It’s not a promise that you’ll change your circumstances or that you’ll end the job or you’ll quit or you’ll end the marriage or anything, whatever decision, or that you’ll stop the friendship or leave the group. It just means that you’re going to, I mean, really this journey is about an inward journey that says, how do I look at the state of my own soul? And how do I be a steward of the soul that I have, and a steward of the life that I’ve been given? And what does it take to get there? Or as a community, how do we steward the neighbourhood that we’re serving? Well, how do we care for the participants in this community well?
And so it doesn’t mean that you’re shaking things up and dramatically changing circumstances or anything like that, but it means that you’re making a decision in a really intentional way that you can live at peace with.
I will say that whenever you have a decision that you feel like is inevitably going to break hearts, like if you have no good choice, that’s a really difficult place to be in. And I talk in the last chapter about a conversation I had with Dr. Michaela O’Donnell-Long, who we both know and respect. She’s the leader of the Depree Center at Fuller Seminary, and Michaela and I were talking about the difference between chronic and acute pain.
And oftentimes like when we make a decision that breaks our heart or breaks the hearts of other people, or both, we’re choosing between a chronic and acute pain, there’s a pain that we’ve learned to live with that’s familiar, that seems like home that we’ve learned to manage, and then an unfamiliar pain that we don’t quite know how to manage. And it can be very acute when you make that initial decision. So yeah, I think that’s one of the things that’s kind of scary about making a big decision that’s going to hurt.
Mark Labberton:
One of the aspects of your writing that really comes through clearly and struck me again and again in the book, was how much respect you pay to human experience and to human feelings and perceptions and circumstances and communities. Sometimes when one reads a book that could, broadly speaking, fall into some element of self-help, it often feels fundamentally egotistical and self-centric in a way that is really, maybe useful in some way, but not taking a full account of the full reality and respect that’s due in lots of directions, because it’s always in the end about the person themselves only.
Whereas, I just want to say Angela, I think one of the things that makes the book powerful to me is that you don’t operate in that circumstance. You’re naming your own experience and owning it appropriately, of course. And at the same time, you are trying to do what you just described, namely inviting people into a much more comprehensive self-examination with respect to all of the various pieces that are there, which really helps to validate, I think, in the end, the earnestness of the discernment that you’re trying to make.
Sometimes people use discernment when really all it means is, I just need to get to the bottom line of what I want, whereas this book is not just about deciding what I want, that is a relevant piece of what decision making is, but it’s a lot richer and frankly, more complicated than only that. Were you conscious of that, or is that just so built into the framework of your way of seeing the world that this respect comes through naturally and pretty continuously, I think?
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Well, I don’t think it’s incredibly conscious in the sense of if I don’t do this, then I do think it comes more naturally to me than that. But I think when I think about my own spiritual formation, I think about the Bible, for example. It’s just filled with all these people’s lives that we’re stumbling through life. They’re getting it right sometimes getting it wrong a lot of times. They’re weeping, they’re joyful. It’s just all this lived experience, and we’re going, oh, I can see myself in this story.
I know what it is to experience that type of feeling. Even Jesus’s life, it’s like he gets really angry, he gets really sad, his friends betray him, he is forgotten, and then he is loved, and he participates in people’s healing, and he really sees people and they really get, oh, this is who you are. And so I think I wanted a kind of book with Brave and difficult decisions where people, no matter what they were grappling with, or no matter what a community was grappling with, they could find themselves going, oh yeah, I know a little bit of what that feels like. I know that struggle. I feel that pain. Or I see why you could live with that kind of conviction. I think that there’s very few things in life that help us to feel deeply connected to God and to others than stories.
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
And so, I love the way that stories invite us into other worlds and then help. I mean, that’s why movies are so powerful. And then they help us to imagine a future that feels doable with God’s help. And that’s the other thing is that I really tried to integrate, throughout this book, I’m integrating all these different traditions. Everything from the Quakers to Pentecostal traditions that would be more that really talk about God meeting us in dreams.
And so I’m trying to really leave room. I wanted it to be a capacious book that there’s lots of ways that you can hear from God, lots of ways that God shows up and shows us the way. And then I also really wanted people to realise that, know that God’s story that is happening in the universe right now, this story that God is nurturing in the world, no decision in your life, that story doesn’t hinge on this decision in your life.
Mark Labberton:
Yeah, it’s very rich. So one of the things that I think a lot of people feel when they are trying to make difficult decisions is that they might naturally try to do their own self-examination, and they might naturally try to turn to certain people outside them who might be a help. But in the end, I’ve had so many people say to me that in different moments, I felt so isolated. It was really just my decision. I’m the one that had to do the sorting and actually finally the decision making and then to enact what it was that I was going to do.
I think the way you tell your story, both things are really strong. It’s clear that your decisions about your marriage and your decisions about your workplace and your job were really individual decisions, but at the same time, the way you portray it is that it’s pretty thickly contextualized. Can you just say a bit about the contextualization of an individual decision making that you’re trying to encourage and I think exemplify?
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that, first it’s just important to say context matters, and there’s no one size fits all. And I think that this is my problem. My biggest problem with American politics right now in this day and age in 2025 is just there’s all the time. It’s like this or that, or it’s all these false binaries. Do you think this or do you think that? And I’m like, well, it’s actually more nuanced, it’s more complex. It really, the context matters.
And so I just find myself wanting to say that all the time. And so I think the same when it comes to people’s lives and the decisions that they’re making. I think even sometimes we can say to ourselves, it this or is it that? And it’s probably more nuanced and it’s really more context. And so this journey that I’m inviting people on is about being able to tease out that context and to ask yourself, let’s think more about the past and where do you come from?
Who are the communities that made you, what are the stories that you’ve lived and how does that speak to the moment that you’re existing in now? And then what baggage do you have from the past? And how do you make sure that you’re not seeing the present moment through the past? And how do you think about the feelings that are coming into this decision for yourself? Do you need to work through some difficult feelings so that you don’t make this decision from an angry place, from a place of profound grief, these sorts of things.
So yeah, I think that it’s really important to realise that, that being able to understand what’s actually happening in the context of your life at a particular moment matters a lot for a particular decision. And the same is when you hear that someone made a complex choice, recognizing that you probably don’t have near the information that they do about the context that they’re living in. And so to be always, I think, as gracious as possible.
Mark Labberton:
I know that for me, at times of making hard decisions, I’ve often relied, of course, on people that I’ve known a really long time, maybe in my whole life in the case of family or multi-decade friendships that have been really important. But it’s not been unusual to me to discover someone in the process of discernment that might be a relatively new character in my life, who the need for the decision-making might actually be the reason why I exerted some energy to try to know the person or ask the questions or explore things. That might be true in the form of a therapist, but it also isn’t true in the form of just someone who has greater wisdom about a given thing than I do, or that anyone in my immediate relational network might have.
And I think it’s an interesting thing that the process of decision-making itself can be a self-knowledge, but self-growing season where there’s all kinds of discovery and potential joy, even in the difficult places, to realise how much this and that and the other thing are really all part of the constellation that makes us who we are individually.
One of the things that I think is very strong in the book and clear, but I want to have you talk about more, is really the community part of this and the implications of decision making as a community. Because it is one thing to make our own individual decisions, and probably, I’m guessing that probably the majority of people that pick up this book will pick it up for personal reasons. But almost always, we are part of communities making decisions in one way or another. And so the layering of this book applies to communities in such action. Talk to us about that.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Yeah, there are a lot of times I think when communities also feel that they’re in this liminal space where they need to figure out something together that matters deeply. It’s not just a technical change that they need to make. What time do we have our Sunday morning service or something like that, or do we add this other staff member? I mean, do we change the staff members’ job description in our organisation?
But there are sometimes when these questions are really complex such as, do we stay open or do we close? We have lost a significant portion of our budget in the last year. What do we let go of? Or, this person on our staff betrayed everyone. They’re broken-hearted about it. We are too. What do we do about it?
So there are moments where communities of, or an organisation, where they’re asking these big questions together. And I think that there can be a burden on communities even more than for individuals of, I need to respond quickly. We need to get this done.
I would encourage if your community is asking a big question to try not to press it and get it done, but to say, what is a way that we can create space to really hear from God, to hear from each other, and to move forward in a way that we’re doing change together and not to each other? I’m all about, when I teach leadership, I say, let’s try to do change with people and not to them.
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
And so, a discernment journey for a community can do exactly that. It can help everyone to feel heard, to feel like they were a part of the decision. And so I think it is good to put a timeline on it. We’re going to spend two months, or we’re going to spend this many sessions talking about this thing, and these are the things that we’re going to do in these sessions, and then we’re going to make the decision together, and these are the people who get to make the decision. Being clear from the get-go, or like we’re going to make this decision as a community in this way, so that you’re just setting up the expectations well for people.
But yeah, I think it’s really important to take our time and to make sure that we feel at peace with where it’s going. And when we’re making a complex choice like this, a lot of times I think leaders of organisations think, I was not prepared for this kind of decision. No one taught me how to do this.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Well, and I do think people’s temperaments figure into the puzzle of trying to do this as a group, where some people are quite easy and even quick making a decision. It may not be the whole group that’s yet ready to take that on board. That person needs to enter in fully, as much as they can, to the group process and not just sort of jump to the conclusion, which they then express frustration that everyone else is taking so much time to reach when they believe they’ve reached it almost immediately.
So that’s an example of just one of the many dynamics that happens when you’re trying to discern a thing together. I think what you’re saying about clarity and a preset amount of time that you’re ready to devote to this, I think I’ve often been slow to establish an outer boundary, and people that have worked with me, I’m sure have felt that they’ve expressed that at times very legitimately, because I have more patience than most people do with the length of time that it takes to do something. And I am not trying to delay it for the sake of a decision or evade a decision, but because I actually think there’s so many layers that often fit in that I’m as taken up by those questions as I am by the conclusion. That doesn’t help for people that are much faster decision makers.
So yeah, I was just curious about that. One of the things too that is pressing us, I think in different ways is a piece of language that we hear every day in a thousand ways, which is that “We’re now going to decide that we’re going to be data-driven.” Now, let’s just use that phrase, data of course, can be very rich and narrow title, it can also be numbers or facts of things. So in a moment where the pressure on some decision-making is let’s make data-driven decisions, how does that figure into the puzzle of making decisions as a community?
Angela Williams Gorrell:
I think that I would just advocate if someone said that to me and I’m a part of the community that’s making a decision together, I would say that’s one part of it, absolutely. But there are other dimensions to good decision-making and discernment than just data. Data can tell us certain things, but it can’t tell us everything.
Some of the things that are at play when we’re making a difficult decision as a community, for example, are difficult feelings, and data doesn’t really help us to address difficult feelings, to work through them in constructive ways, to pray about these things, to work through these things in such a way that we can take away the fog, get through, and be able to see more clearly the way that we should go.
Then also, another thing that I can think about is the way that our past weighs on us when we’re making a difficult decision. So for example, if you’re in a community and someone feels like, or a few people feel like they’ve really been let down in the past by this community, then there’s an aspect to decision-making that probably involves forgiveness. Releasing resentment so that you can move forward in a way that you feel at peace with where you’re going.
And so there’s just also, I think if you’re a spiritual community, there’s absolutely a way of living open to God’s leading that you want to be a part of this decision. So what does it mean to sit together and to ask open-ended questions and to see how God shows up in those questions together, or to share stories and to reflect together and to see how God shows up in our experiences as well. And so, I think I would just advocate that the data can say one thing or a few things about the moment that we’re in, but it can’t touch on all aspects of this complex decision for us. And so we need to account for these other things that we find as just as important.
Also, our values, one of the chapters is about selecting values, and it’s really trying to decide as a community, I mean, there’s so many values and virtues that we could be living for that we could feel like are equally good things, but in this moment, in this time, what is our community called to embody? What are we pursuing and what are we doing? And what set of values is guiding us toward making this complex choice?
And data can say something about like, hey, this percentage of people think about this value or live this value, or something like that. But it can’t do all the things. And I think that that is something, I’m actually writing a talk right now that I’m going to give at West Chester University, and I was just thinking about the needs of the soul that Simone Bay writes about, and how we think as leaders, as educators in so many organisations in contemporary society, we think that science and progress that these are and that optimization efficiency are the things that we really need to focus on and that are good for us. Meanwhile, the soul is starving.
And so yeah, that’s a little rabbit trail there, but hopefully… I’m just thinking about how organisations can do the same thing. They can be focused on optimization, efficiency, getting it done quickly, all the while the people within the organisation are starting.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Well, I think that’s one of the reasons why for me, diverse participants in a decision-making group makes so much difference and why having the richness of backgrounds, experiences, genders, that creates really different conversation than if it’s a homogeneous group defined in such a way that there’s only basically one possible line of thinking, and everybody just needs to get on board with that. That sort of homogeneity that’s about conformity is really, for me, very difficult.
Whereas the complexity of acknowledging how remarkable it is that God has made the world as diverse as it is and that God uses a diversity of people to help speak. But that is tricky because it means people learning to make decisions and listening in different ways. I’m wondering how issues from your experience or from your perspective on teaching on these subjects, how issues of race and gender, for example, as two of the bigger ones, affect how these dynamics of corporate decision-making occur?
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Yes. Can I just say that? Yeah.
Mark Labberton:
There’s just so much to say about both of those two things, right?
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Yeah. Well, just like we were talking a moment ago about contextualization, and also I was just thinking as you were talking too, that sometimes the data tells us what to do, and it feels like a really the best idea. And sometimes the best idea isn’t the good idea that we need to do. And I say in the book, sometimes good decisions don’t feel good.
Sometimes the life worth living is not about pursuing happiness. There’s a lot of people in this book that their lives would be seen as pretty difficult by a lot of people, but they made these brave difficult choices because they thought that they were pursuing the most meaningful life that they could. And so, yeah, I think this relates to these questions of gender and race is that, when we’re existing in a community with other people who are different from us, we might think, oh, the way you’re doing that is not the best way, and we’re not headed… Like we’re trying to get here. We’re trying to be really successful. And yet you’re where you’re going with that, the story you’re sharing, the experiences, it’s slowing us down. It’s not towards success. You’re postured towards something else, and that’s not even the end that we’re interested in.
But what happens is when we rub elbows with and iron sharpens iron, right, with people who are different from us, they can help to enlighten us and to realise, oh, wait, maybe the thing that I’m aiming toward is not actually worthy of everything that I am and all that I have. Maybe the thing that we as a community have been very interested in is actually not the thing that we need to be really interested in. But it also, it can be very difficult because it’s slow to listen to everyone in a space to welcome people’s perspectives and experiences. It takes time.
But I think that those are just a couple of positives that can come from it. And then also, again, when we do change with each other and not to each other, then in the end, once we establish “This is where we’re going,” then we have way more people on board who are ready to do the work together, who are ready to live together and work alongside of each other.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, exactly. I certainly can say that as a pastor for all of these decades, that one of the things that I would say has been a continuous theme is that if somebody ever asked me, pastor, what could I be praying for? It was always discernment. Or I would say that or wisdom.
And it was because all of that is to me, a part of love. It’s also because all of that is part of justice. It’s because all of that is about what is more than the self or the flash or the urgency or the crisis. It’s about trying to live very much in the moment and with the relationship or the person or the reality that is right in front of you, but you’re also trying to do it in a way that is being fed, nourished, soul filling in the way I think you were pointing to a minute ago, by perspectives that are much richer than just, how do I get this off my desk and into somebody else’s hands?
That’s a legitimate decision in its own right, but it’s this wider sense of trying to bring wisdom to the table. And I think the sum of the book to me is in many ways a call to wisdom. And even more than a call, a road toward wisdom by the layering that you do of the things that gradually build up capacity for decision-making that is valuable at every stage along the road, but it becomes thicker and richer and more satiating, perhaps, than in the earlier stages of a person’s life or in any given chapter. And at least it gives me a hunger for more of that, which I just felt was always one of the number one things that as a leader, I was always pursuing.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Wow, you made me think about Lady Wisdom in the Hebrew scriptures, the metaphor for wisdom is this woman, and she invites-
Mark Labberton:
John 28.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
… You to come and dine. Yes. And Lady Wisdom invites us to come and to dine at her house and to sit at a table together. And so when I think we think about practicing discernment, and we can have that kind of image in our mind both as a community or as an individual that’s seeking a community of others to help us to navigate difficult roads, that’s a helpful image. This is not something to rush through. We sit at the table with God and with others, and we take it in and we listen.
Mark Labberton:
Well, I do think it applies in some ways, particularly right now when depending on where you might be politically on any given day, there’s such a spectrum of division as you mentioned, and then there’s a spectrum of ferocity and aggressiveness that comes from different points of view, and it gives you a sense of being overheated. Like, we have to make a decision and we have to get this right, or we have to get this changed. We have to get this addressed. And yet the very nature of the circumstance that we’re in actually makes that impossible, because every day there are such radical surprises and cultural and political and economic changes that are underway.
And as a consequence, the pursuit of wisdom in a time like this is both all the more compelling. I heard a song once about a guy who was just going to one of the big box hardware stores wandering around, as the lyrics said, trying to find somebody who knows what they’re doing. Well, we live in a day when it feels like a lot of people are wandering around trying to find somebody who knows what they’re doing. And I think the journey that you’re underscoring here, the deep long journey, is a journey of realising that we’re trying to grow in that and that circumstances, the ones that we’re facing on a broader level right now, make this even more complicated than it might otherwise be.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
And I hope people here are complicated in a beautiful way.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, it’s a beautiful way.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
In a way that makes life more digestible, makes it more, I get to be more vulnerable. I get to live more open more deeply. Rather than making a pros and cons list, I get to ask, “What road leads toward healing, toward wholeness? What helps me or this community to embody love, joy, peace, gentleness, the different fruit of the spirit?”
And so that’s what I hope we’re helping people that are listening to say, oh, I get to experience life in a richer, deeper way. I don’t have to pretend like that it’s just this or that. And when I was teaching a class at Baylor University called Integrative Theology, I was trying to help leaders of all kinds to walk through a discernment process of like, how are you going to make a big complicate… And this obviously fed into the book, but I would put an iceberg on the whiteboard.
And then the iceberg exercise actually ends up in, it’s the first exercise at the back of the book. And by the way, there are three ways to read the book, and one is to do some of these exercises first and then go, oh, I need to end up in this chapter, and you can skip around.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, it’s a great resource.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Oh, thank you. And so the iceberg exercise, it’s like there’s always this pressing question that feels like, oh, this is the question that we’re asking and answering, of course. But really, if you put that question above the water, then most big questions are like an iceberg. There’s all this ice beneath the surface that you don’t see. That’s really the stuff that people are grappling with.
Which is why it’s so important in a community to try to get at the stuff beneath the surface, because it’s not really just a matter of, do we keep our doors open or do we close? It’s all the stuff beneath that, what are the fears that people have? If we go one way or the other, what are the experiences that we’ve had as a community that are playing into the way that we’re seeing this current question and so on?
And I think the more that we can get at the stuff beneath the water in our individual and communal decisions, and as well as our big political decisions that we’re trying to make together, the better that we can feel about the decision that we make.
Mark Labberton:
One of the gifts that you’ve given us in this book is, that you’re providing a set of tools that people of different ages, different levels of experience, different levels of challenge and difficulty and complexity can all jump in and find resources in this book. That would be tremendously helpful. And I think it is setting up resonances in our life about how do we live day by day, where the decision making is just a simple built in system at times, not a standalone system, but just a normal operating system of every day.
That can also become applicable when we have the really standalone issues that rise up and demand our attention or call for our examination in a different degree. And the fact that the book has resources that serve people at so many different levels is part of the wonder of the book that I think is really part of the gift that you’ve given. So thank you again for that.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Thank you. Yeah. I’m really hopeful that people will see it that, that they’ll be able to return to it a number of times and say, okay, for this moment in my life, I can draw on these tools or these chapters. But as you’re saying that it could be, oh, if I want to develop this wisdom muscle, this discernment muscle in my life, these are some of the practices I need to take on to be able to do that.
For example, the surrender chapter is about every decision starts with, I got to let this, I got to make an offering here of, just I feel powerless. I feel like I’ve gotten to the end of what I can do with my information, and now I just need your help, God, I need other people’s help.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, yes.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
I am feeling fragile right now. And so if we can make surrender one of those practices in our life, and then yeah, the other chapters as well, I think it is about practices of wisdom that we’re trying to engage on a regular basis in our lives.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, amen. Angela, this book is a great gift and this conversation has been too. So thank you again very, very much for being a guest. I really hope many people will read the book and soak in the book, because I think it can be read at lots of different levels, in lots of different circumstances. So thank you for writing it, and thank you for giving us the gift of your time today.
Angela Williams Gorrell:
Oh, thank you, Mark. Thank you for reading it and for your really thoughtful questions and reflections. I appreciate that so much immensely. And if you’re listening, I would love to connect with you. You can connect with me on Instagram or through my website. I love to hear from people who have heard conversations or read my book. So email me, message me. I would love to hear from you.
