The Question You Are Asking Is Not the One You Are Stuck On

A friend of mine could not decide about a job for seven months, and then she solved it in about nine minutes at a kitchen island, and not by deciding.

She had done everything properly. She had prayed about the job. She had listed the pros and cons twice. She had asked her husband and two women she trusts. She had read about how to make decisions and had found it faintly insulting, which I sympathize with.

I asked her to say the question out loud, exactly as she had been praying it.

She said: should I take the job.

And then, because there was nothing else to do, I asked her what she was afraid of, and she said something instantly that had nothing to do with the job at all. She said: I am afraid that if I take it and it goes badly, everybody will say I did it for the money.

We sat there. And then she said, in a slightly different voice, that she had not prayed about that once in seven months.

Seven months of praying about a job, and the thing that had her stuck was a fear about what people would say, and the two had been wearing the same coat the entire time.

The psalm promises instruction, not a verdict

The verse people carry into a decision like this is worth reading for what it actually offers.

I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye. (Psalm 32:8, King James Version)

Instruct and teach. Those are both words about a person being formed rather than a question being answered. And then, guide thee with mine eye, which is the image of somebody close enough to catch a glance.

None of that is a verdict handed down from a distance. All of it assumes proximity and a process.

You have been promised teaching rather than a ruling, and teaching happens to a person over time rather than to a question in a moment, and Psalm 32 uses two verbs about instruction before it says anything about the way, and that part belongs to the Holy Spirit, who does that teaching in a person while a decision sits unresolved.

Now notice where that verse sits. The whole psalm before it is about something being said out loud. It is the psalm of a man who kept silent about a thing and describes what the silence did to his bones, and then he says he acknowledged it and stopped hiding it.

Instruction comes after speech in that psalm. That order is not decoration.

Why the smaller question hides

Here is the mechanism, and it is not spiritual and it is not anybody's fault.

The big question is the one that is socially acceptable to have. Should I take the job is a respectable thing to be praying about, and a person can say it out loud to anybody without embarrassment.

The smaller question underneath is usually not respectable. It is about being judged, or about wanting something you think you should not want, or about a person whose opinion has more power over you than you would like to admit.

So the big question gets prayed and the small one does not, and the small one is the one holding the whole thing still.

You are not being asked to have better fears, and the smaller question is not a shameful thing to be carrying (Psalm 139:23). That work is the Spirit's, and He brings a hidden thing up gently rather than exposing it, which is one of the ways you can tell it is Him.

David asks for exactly this, and he asks for it rather than dreading it.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts. (Psalm 139:23)

He is not asking to be found out. He is asking to be shown, which is a different transaction entirely.

Say the ugly one out loud

The practical part of this is very small and it is uncomfortable, which is why almost nobody does it.

Say the decision out loud, in the words that have been used all along. Then ask, honestly, what the fear underneath it is, and say that out loud too, in whatever undignified words come first.

Not tidied up. Not made theological. If the true sentence is I am afraid my sister will think I am selfish, then that is the sentence, and dressing it up as I want to honor my family is how it stays hidden for another seven months.

You have permission to say an undignified sentence to God, and Philippians says in every thing by prayer and supplication let your requests be made known (Philippians 4:6), and the Holy Spirit is the one who receives a sentence like that without flinching, which nobody else in your life is guaranteed to do.

In every thing. That phrase is doing more work than it looks like. It includes the embarrassing question, the petty fear, and the motive a person would not want repeated.

You have been carrying a sentence nobody has ever heard, and Scripture put no filter on the list of things a person may bring (Philippians 4:6). The same Spirit is the one who receives an undignified sentence without recoiling from it.

I should say plainly that naming it does not always dissolve it. Sometimes the fear survives being said and a person has to walk with it. This is not a technique for removing fears and I will not sell it as one.