You Can Trust Yourself to Make Good Decisions

How I'm thinking about the future and God's will amid a big life transition.

As some of you know, after six years here, I’m leaving New York City very soon. The movers come next week, and I’ll spend a day furiously cleaning (gotta get that security deposit back) before packing up a rental car and driving 10 hours to Ohio to stay with family for a month.

Brooklyn Bridge Park, summer 2024

Moving is terrible; I’m convinced a lot of New Yorkers pay too much for their already-pricey apartments because moving one’s stuff makes one feel insane. And if I dwell on the fact that I don’t know where my bed will be December 1, I can easily spin out over the uncertainty of it all.

People don’t seem to do well with uncertainty. Especially anxious people — so I’ve heard. Grasping to see a future we don’t know, can’t know, and aren’t ultimately supposed to know, how easy and morbidly comforting for us to project out and imagine the worst:

I’ll move to Chicago and have no friends and end up in an apartment with no natural light and want to go jump off Navy Pier, and a tourist will film my icy demise and post it on TikTok.

I’ll move to Chicago and get sucked back into the Wheaton-y evangelical bubble — the very one that made me want to move to NYC — and suddenly find myself caring about Christianity Today’s official take on yoga pants.

I’ll move to Grand Rapids and find it as stifling as Wheaton, only with the added disadvantage of not being Dutch.

I won’t in fact leave Ohio, but will stay and never go to an indie movie theater again and consider Cracker Barrel a fine dining experience (jk, Cracker Barrel will always be dope). All my NYC friends — and a part of myself — will wonder if I’ve kind of given up on life.

I will stay in Ohio and try to become a mom, but it won’t work, and five years from now, I will still be wondering if anything will ever happen to me.

“Catastrophizing” is defined as “an irrationally negative forecast of future events.” It’s a cognitive distortion offering itself as a salve. We think that if we conjure the worst possible outcome of a big decision, we will be more prepared to face the outcome should it come to pass. Our instinct to avoid pain runs so deep, we prefer to make ourselves mentally miserable now, imagining all sorts of future sufferings, instead of focusing on the present, which is actually pretty good, if we can stay within it.

I am starting to wonder if this fixation on the unknown future prevents many of us from seeing the gift of life, now, as it’s unfolding.

Listen to the poem “Yes,” by former Poet Laureate William E. Stafford:

It could happen any time, tornado,

earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.

Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That’s why we wake

and look out—no guarantees

in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,

like right now, like noon,

like evening.

(The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems, Graywolf Press, 1999)

No Right Answer

Of course, most Christians turn to prayer facing big decisions and transitions, asking God for clarity and direction:

Lord, should I take this job?

Lord, should I marry this person?

Lord, should I move closer to family?

Lord, should I join this church?

Lord, should I take up crocheting whimsical doilies after seeing an Instagram reel about it?

Yet with many of life’s big decisions, barring obvious sin, there’s no right or wrong answer. Any number of choices could be both permissible and something God can work with.

In addition, very few of us ever hear a heavenly voice from on high telling us which way to go — at least not one much discernibly different from our own subconscious desires. I am coming to terms with the premise that God doesn’t have a blueprint for our lives. Instead, perhaps, God is excited to see what lives we will create through a series of small and large choices, as we exercise agency as image bearers, gifted with reason and intuition and, hopefully, community and some wisdom, knowing all our multiple futures are secure in him.

How I often wish this weren’t so. One critical take on the psychological utility of religion is that, amid a dizzying array of options and opinions in a complex world, religion tells people what to do and think and be. It gives comfort to the perplexed. Listen to the monologue from Fleabag season 2, as the titular character, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is confessing to Hot Priest (Andrew Scott):

I want someone to tell me what to wear in the morning. No, I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like. What to hate. What to rage about. What to listen to. What band to like. What to buy tickets for. What to joke about. What not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in. Who to vote for and who to love and how to…tell them.

I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong. And I know that’s why people want someone like you in their lives, because you just tell them how to do it. You just tell them what to do and what they’ll get out of the end of it, even though I don’t believe your bull— and I know that scientifically nothing that I do makes any difference in the end, anyway, I’m still scared. Why am I still scared? So just tell me what to do. Just f—ing tell me what to do, Father.”

(Let me go on record as saying, I don’t advise hooking up with your priest, even if he is as dashing as the Fleabag one.)

Another critique of religion is that it prevents people from developing the agency and discernment to navigate life, so that “sheeple” remain dependent on an external religious structure and fail to grow into independent adults who can trust their own internal compass.

On one hand, I reject the notion that to be a real adult means you’re finally free from relying on others, whether on a religious leader or community or friends and family, to navigate life. There is no such thing as an “individual.”

“Allegory of Charity,” Francisco de Zurburan, 1655, Museo del Prado

On the other hand, I agree that when people grow up hearing they are bad and broken and can’t trust their own hearts, they may lack the self-confidence needed to navigate complex decisions. And relying on an external religious system to tell you what to do may alleviate anxieties, but it also spawns new ones: How do I know which church or leader or tradition to follow? How do I discern what is actually God’s voice instead of my own? What do I do when a leader or community tells me to go in a direction that brings disastrous results? How do I ever know my motives are truly “pure”?

Various religious subcultures may be threatened by the thought of believers running around making decisions for themselves (although I would say in retort, you can thank the Protestant Reformation for that). But God is not threatened. At least I don’t think so. If God were threatened by our free will, God would have made humans incapable of refusing his love. And love coerced rather than chosen isn’t love at all.

Worthy of Trust

Somewhere inside I have this True Self. She is the self who is most deeply attuned to God’s love and delight, who is most alive in her body, most generous and compassionate toward others, most earnestly invested in the world and all its complex problems and sufferings, and most capable of seeing life for the gift it is rather than an endless slog of emails and disappointments and disasters, and also more emails.

This True Self is always there, and I ought to listen to her more. It’s taken me a long time to realize it, but she is worthy of trust. I know this because, after much deliberation and conversation and prayer, she said, “Hey, you should go live in New York for a while.” And she was right. She was so right.

So, upon leaving New York City, a very bittersweet reality these days, I know I can face the uncertainty of tomorrow, because, yes, God holds it (because “He Lives,” as the somewhat saccharine Old Timey hymn says), and also, because my True Self will be there, helping me chart a new and good path, one sure step at a time. —KB

Central Park, fall 2024. Image: Jon Coppage