When God Says It's Your Choice

Image text: "Choice." Image source.

Long ago, I was at some Christian event, and a speaker was giving a talk about listening to God, and how to know what God wants you to do. One of the examples he gave went something like this: "I was thinking about asking my girlfriend to marry me, so I prayed about it, I prayed about it so much, asking God if I should do it, and finally I felt like God was saying 'it's your choice.'" (And then he did end up marrying her.)

This was really surprising to me at the time because the idea of God giving you a choice- rather than God "having a plan" regarding a big important decision in your life- was totally new to me. I think this speaker's talk also included other examples where he was trying to make a decision, and he determined that God wanted him to make some specific choice- but this is the example that I remember, because it was the exception to the rule. We had a very strong belief that "God has a plan for your life" and you have to pray about every important decision, to make sure you're following God's plan and not accidentally ruining your life (this is very stressful). The idea that sometimes there can be multiple good choices, and God is fine with you choosing any of them- well, that was new and surprising.

Okay, so here's a question: Let's imagine 2 different ideologies. In the first one, God has a plan for your life, and you have to do what God wants, but perhaps occasionally God is okay with you choosing for yourself based on your own preferences. In the second, you always make your own choices, without input from God. When God lets you make your own choice in the first ideology, is that the same situation as a choice you make in the second ideology? 

No, I don't think it's the same at all.

In this story where this guy prayed about marrying his girlfriend, and God said "it's your choice," what kind of circumstance would lead to God saying that? God must be looking at the available options, and reasoning that if this dude is allowed to choose for himself, he's not going to choose anything that's going to end up being catastrophic. I imagine it like, he really wants to marry her, but he's hesitating because he's not sure if God is okay with it, or if there might be something bad about the relationship that he's unaware of. God knows it will work out fine, really the only determining factor is this guy's own interest in marrying her, and so it's okay for God to let him make his own choice.

So God knows that no matter which way it goes, it will be okay. God knows there's not some unexpected terrible thing that's going to happen as a result of them getting married. When God lets you make your own choice in a situation like that, it's basically like God is giving you information- now you know that there's not going to be some horrible outcome that no one could have predicted.

(Or, alternatively, it means that if something does go wrong afterward, it's still okay because God believes this is an okay outcome for you.)

Another example might be, if you're thinking about moving to another country to become a missionary, and it's going to be difficult and maybe even dangerous- and you ask God if you should do it, and They say it's your choice. In this case, God lets you have a choice because you know the risks, and They are letting you decide for yourself if you're willing to take on those risks.

So I would say, in this "God has a plan for your life" ideology, in the cases where God lets you make your own choice, it's because all the options are basically fine and nothing terrible will happen, or it's because you clearly understand the risks and the benefits and it's a matter of your own feelings and opinions about taking an action that has those risks and benefits.

This is completely different from just living life without ever running any of your choices by God. In this kind of lifestyle, there are plenty of decisions you have to make where you don't know the outcome, you don't really have enough information to say one option is better than another, but you just have to do your best. What job to take, where to live, decisions about dating and marriage, having kids, buying a house, whether or not to go see a doctor when you might have a medical issue or it might just be nothing, or even situations where you're just living your normal life and then something bad comes out of nowhere (like you got in a car accident that could have been prevented if God had told you not to drive there that day), etc. We don't have anyone directing us toward the options that have everything working out okay. We just have to do our best, with the limited information we have. 

It's a totally different thing than believing that God has a plan but lets you make the decision if it's one of the more straightforward ones.

Honestly I'm glad I'm no longer living in the "God has a plan for your life" way, because it was so stressful, making decisions based on analyzing my feelings to try to figure out if any of them were planted there by God in order to tell me what the right choice was. In that ideology, you can't just look at the situation, look at the real-world facts- because the real-world facts will tell you that there is some probability it will go a certain way, and some probability it will go a different way, probability this probability that- but if you could get God's take on it, then you could have certainty. The path to certainty is overanalyzing all of your feelings and asking if they seem like the sort of feelings that God would give you if They wanted you to choose a certain option- and of course there's no actual standard to check that against. 

So much stress, trying to figure out what God was telling me, rather than just looking at the facts and doing my best and taking the responsibility myself.

When God says "it's your choice"... what would that mean, under the "God has a plan for your life" paradigm? It must mean God knows that whatever choice you make, it's okay- none of the available options would be horribly worse than the others. Or, it must mean that God knows you already have an accurate understanding of the good and bad aspects of each of the options. There are guardrails- God's not going to say "it's your choice" if one of the options would lead to something really bad, in a way that's impossible for you to have predicted. This is very different from a belief system where we're on our own and we don't try to suss out "God's will for your life" when making big decisions.

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