When we make our life decisions we often go round and round in our minds, not quite knowing which set of factors should be given greater weight. Sometimes reason competes with gut instinct, which only seems to make matters worse. But what if we could place all our decisions in the hands of God? What if a decision surrendered to the Divine was a decision surrendered to the highest level of intelligence, wisdom, and love?
We are not schooled by traditional modes of thinking to believe that such effortlessness is possible, and so we remain locked into the stress of making decisions about a future we cannot forecast. We stand before a bend in the road without knowing what is around the corner. Yet we are expected to make decisions about what might be there, decisions that could affect the rest of our lives.
God dwells in a realm that is separate from our human drama, in which the horrors and pain of this world do not exist. But He sends into this realm a divine ambassador, the Holy Spirit, imbued with His power to deliver us from fear to love. Because the Holy Spirit is the part of our mind that remains in conscious contact with God, we can safely place all decisions in His hands. The mortal ego dwells in linear time and does not know the future; the Holy Spirit dwells in eternity and therefore does.
All of us have at one stage or other of our lives made wrong decisions and experienced deep remorse. Often we receive a kind of “inner knowing” about something, yet we disregard that knowing because we cannot rationally explain it. The more we pray, meditate, and take our spiritual practice seriously, the better listeners we become to the small, still voice for God. We come to understand that there are means of knowing beyond the rational. It is not an abdication of responsibility, but rather the ultimate taking of responsibility, to ask God to do our thinking for us. He is not outside us. He is the mind of the realised self.
Sometimes we wonder, “Should I have that meeting on Friday or Saturday?” We look at our calendar and see that Friday is the less busy day, therefore the most rational day to set up the meeting, but something inside keeps saying, “Do it on Saturday…..” So many times in my life I have gone with Friday, only to have something happen later that made Friday very much the wrong day. And Saturday, of course, would have been perfect.
God’s answers do not always come through as loudly or clearly as full-page newspaper ads, but they find their way to us nevertheless. Sometimes we do not hear an answer simply because we are not listening. Sometimes we hear exactly what God is telling us, but we are not yet prepared to own up to what we know.
By cultivating a state of mind in which we place our decisions where they belong, in the hands of One who always knows what we should do, we draw on a mystical power no worldly means of decision-making can match. God will listen and God will answer, with a prescience, wisdom, intelligence and love for us and for everyone in the whole entire world.
