So You’re Anxious About God’s Will: Three Thoughts on Figuring It Out

I’m poking fun at myself along with the rest of you, because I’ve had those conversations bemoaning that I have *literally* no clue what to do with my life. But, I’ve been in that complaining, anxious, spiral-freak out lost dark wood place enough that I’ve also started to figure some things out and to listen to the things being said around me in those moments. From this, I’ve managed to come up with a couple principles that have helped this whole “figuring out God’s will” thing come to make more sense.

1. Ask “Do I want to do this?”

This one falls under “heard around me,” thanks to John Hall. It was one of those catch ups over beers that happen when you’ve known each other forever, and I was worrying about what I wanted to do with my life. John shared his usual wisdom, suggesting I consider doing something I actually liked doing, because it seemed silly to watch me waste my time doing things I didn’t even like. This makes a surprising amount of sense. If you don’t want to do something, in many normal cases you should give weight to that.

Now, sometimes, I don’t want to get up at 5:20 a.m. like I need to for work. But, that is far different from not wanting to do the kind of work I do. Everything comes with pieces we like less than the whole. My dad leaves piles of paper around the house, and my mom likes things orderly. However, the fact that my mom doesn’t like dad leaving paper piles and my dad doesn’t like mom organizing them, in their case, has little to do with whether they like being married to each other. (They assure me they like that very much).

As St. Alphonsus Liguori said, “God wills only our good; God loves us more than anybody else can or does love us.”

2. Ask “is this a viable option for me in reality?”

So, I’m an idealist. I love nothing more than an unrealistic possibility. Like, once I ran a half-marathon. It was around mile eight that I started wishing I had even just run ten miles before trying this out. Man, was I in pain at the end of that. I made the further mistake of sitting down after, and boy, did standing back up suck. But, I was intent to power through, because in my head, I idealized running the half-marathon without considering the particulars of the whole “actually running it” thing.

We can do this with things like discerning God’s will too at times. So, for example, say you are married and are parent to a few kids. Maybe you have a reversion to your faith, and you want to dedicate your life to the Lord, striving after sanctity. Awesome, right? For sure! But, there are limits. In this hypothetical situation, you are married with kids, so running off to join the priesthood or the cloister are essentially not viable options for you in this reality (for normal situations; exceptions prove the rule kids). Or you want to go quit your job and move a few thousand miles away to get a doctorate in theology, even though three of your hypothetical children have special needs. Well, I am all about theology for sure, but again, is that really an actual, viable, realistic option, given the state of your life that day? Again, probably not. Are you validly (or presumed to be validly) married? Then I will tell you what: that cute man or woman you see at adoration is very definitely not your vocation.

I’ve learned that personally, the more real I am with my own internal and external limitations given my life as it is today, the less likely I am to let things that might be objectively good, but essentially inappropriate for my life, as God is working it out now, to induce massive anxiety attacks. It’s freeing to realize that there actually are limits in your life, and that maybe God put them there for a reason.

In other words, I finally started to see the wisdom of when St. Francis de Sales advised that:

Anxiety proceeds from an inordinate desire to be freed from present evil or to acquire a hoped for good. Yet there is nothing that tends more to increase evil and prevent enjoyment of good that to be disturbed and anxious. Birds stay caught in nets and traps because when they find themselves ensnared they flutter about wildly trying to escape and in so doing entangle themselves all the more. Whenever you urgently desire to escape from a certain evil or obtain a certain good you must be especially careful both to put your mind at rest and in peace and to have a calm judgment and will. Then try gently and meekly to accomplish your desire, taking in regular order the most convenient means.

So, don’t make it worse by doing the dwell-spiral-panic tango like those birds, and take the normal means in your life to accomplish the good you desire, even if it doesn’t look exactly like the good of your ideal practice.

3. Ask “Does this make me holy?”

This one comes from another John friend (like half your friends aren’t Mary or John or Matthew), when we were recently talking about how I could know what God wanted for me in the next year or so. I was in fact doing the dwell-spiral-panic tango, and he finally asked “Well, do you think doing that brings you closer to God or not?” Which hit me as both the patently obvious and also easiest question to ask. If moving, taking a job, being friends with that person, marrying that person, going to that school, whatever it is you are anxiously ruminating over, is going to not bring you closer to God, then don’t do it. If it is bringing you closer to God, then do it.

I’m sure someone could challenge me here by asking how do I know if it brings me closer to God or not? This is a great question. Thankfully, God is a good Father, and the Holy Spirit inspired all sorts of helpful things in Sacred Scriptures. As St. Paul tells us in Galatians 5:22-23, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” If you are doing your best to grow in your love for God and neighbor, and you see something making you grow deeper in that love, bearing those fruit of the Holy Spirit, then it’s probably something you should keep doing.

But if, despite you trying your hardest to grow deeper with God (and this is where a spiritual director can be super helpful) you are finding that this job/activity/friendship/relationship is leading you to the works of the flesh,

immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, choosing sides, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like,

as Saint Paul says, then maybe you ought to consider not doing whatever it is that leads you away from love of God and neighbor.

Here’s the thing: God isn’t “messing with us.” He actually isn’t trying to make life super esoteric, you don’t have to read between the lines and tease out an interpretation of His will. Remember, The Father sent the Son because He wanted to give us a heart to know His is God. He wants us to be His Church so that He can really be our Father. He sent His only Son to die on the Cross to redeem us sot that we could love Him with our whole hearts. How awesome is that?

Do you really think a God who loves us this much wants us to be spiraling in panic about finding His will?

No. He wants us to trust that He does love us. And to trust that rather than esoteric, God’s will, whether it is for just the immediate future or the seriously long term future, becomes manifest through prayer and looking at the boring, mundane signs in our everyday life.

Signs like: did the person you like and know to be a good person because you’ve been friends a while ask you out? When you are on date, can you not stop thinking about how awesome the priesthood/convent visit you went on was? Do you love this particular kind of work and have a job doing it? Do you love this particular kind of work and have the ability to get a job doing it?

And yes, sometimes you get a rose. Sometimes there is a photo of you both being baptized the same day. Sometimes God comes in a flash of lightning and says “go preach my name to the nations.” But even for people who get that one big sign, most of the time God’s will is revealed to us by far more ordinary means. What the heck, I’ll ask her out. What the heck, Mom and Dad will pay for me to go to college there. What the heck, I’ll go on a “Come and See” visit with the Mary, Mother of the Eucharist Dominicans. What the heck, I’ll take a course on architectural design. What the heck…I think I could spend the rest of my life with this person.

In the end,

You’ll get mixed up, of course,
as you already know.
You’ll get mixed up
with many strange birds as you go. So be sure when you step.
Step with care and great tact
and remember that Life’s
a Great Balancing Act.

Photos via pexels.com unless otherwise noted.