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Discernment is a word we hear more and more these days. Guidance was what we used to call it, and some still do. Whether we call it discernment or guidance, however, many of the authors agree that where we go and what we do with our lives are the secondary step of discernment, the outward movement of what needs to start as an inward movement.
The first part is that God cares more about who we are, the person we are becoming, and that we know how much he loves us, than which career path we choose. Our identity is to be found first in who we are in God. We tend to lean toward the second movement because that is where our culture tells us our identity lies – “what do you do?” rather than finding our identity in who we are in Christ.
This question is one I get asked a lot by youth and young adults, and I imagine you are asked this too: How do I find my way in our complex and ever-changing world? With the loud and competing voices in the culture around us, how do we hear the voice of God who often comes as a still, small voice, a “gentle whisper” (I Kings 19)?
One of the books I am reading is called the Sacred Compass, by Quaker author J. Brent Bill, (Paraclete Press, 2008.) Bill compares discernment to a compass that gives direction to our lives. We live in the age of the GPS, a precise instrument that tells us exactly where to go and each turn that gets us there. But discernment and guidance are rarely like that. They are more like the compass – we can find true north, and our general direction, but not each detail of the route. Often, we wish God would speak like a GPS, telling us exactly who to be and where to go. Thinking of discernment as a compass is a better metaphor for how guidance and discernment actually work.
Sometimes, when we are looking for guidance and needing discernment, we pull out the compass in the big moments of life, and then find we don’t really know how to use our sacred compass. We find ourselves lost. Yet as we practice discernment more and more in the little moments, when the big moments come the compass won’t fail us.
If we set rhythms in place and make space for God, we will move toward the place where discernment becomes a part of our everyday lives. Then we will be more likely to be able to find our way.
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