Presence

I come into your presence, Lord and I take a moment to clear my mind of all the conflicting thoughts about this decision I have to make. I hand this decision over to you, Lord, and ask you to send me your Holy Spirit to guide me through this decision-making process.  I remain open to all options and possibilities. Come, Holy Spirit and guide me on this journey.

Decision

A friend of mine is an artist, a painter, and he tells me that the most important moment is before he actually gets to painting, with what he calls the invisible frame. You see, he starts with a certain canvas, small or big. And that’s the invisible frame. That’s the limit within which he has to, he hopes, produce something beautiful – create. We all have invisible frames, a definite, limited space within life. And we’re talking about decisions, and it seems that the word decision comes from the Latin “decidere” to cut off. You choose this, you cut off that. There is a ‘yes’, there is a ‘no’. There are always roads not taken. But there’s the great consolation of ‘yes’, of discovering the right road to making a great decision.

Reflection

Any choice we make involves saying ‘yes’ to something in our lives and ‘no’ to something else. That probably seems obvious. There are always positive and negative aspects to any decision we make. No one can have two masters. 

Still, many people find themselves paralysed when it comes to the point of making the choice between one side and the other. St. Ignatius, in his Spiritual Exercises, devotes a whole section to people who get stuck at this point. He identifies three ways people have of acting when the moment for choice comes, and it’s a good idea to spend some time mulling over them for yourself.

Some people, he says, are procrastinators, forever dithering on the edge of making a decision, but never actually coming down firmly on one side or the other. They keep putting it off, over and over again. They never get anywhere.

Others are more subtle: they are the rationalizers. These are people who are stuck in their decision because they are not truly free. They have a strong bias in one direction and keep on hoping to convince themselves that their preference is the right one. But doubts niggle for them, and they can never find real peace.

Finally, St. Ignatius says, there are the people who come to make a decision with genuine freedom and generosity, people whose deepest wish is simply to find out how they can best be of service to God and humanity in their choice. With that attitude as a starting point, resistance tends to fade away, and a choice emerges – with its positive and negative aspects – that can be accepted in peace.

Next Step

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths in any decision you need to make. Proverbs 3:5-6