A New Year: The Blessed Unknown

Borrowing this pic, since I didn't go to the Taipei 101
fireworks show this year, though we did watch from far away

Resolutions vs. The Future

Happy New Year everyone. It's January 1st, that time when many people make resolutions which will seem increasingly less worth the sacrifice it takes to maintain them as the cold weeks slide past. That's the problem with resolutions; they are goals which can't factor in what might happen in the coming months. Sure, maybe you give up out of simple laziness, but let's say you have better reasons than that. Often it's the same reasons we are all familiar with--by mid-February winter has worn most of us down and we don't have the mental fortitude to keep doing productive but willpower-draining things which aren't an established habit quite yet. (In Taiwan there's a different yearly rhythm; no Christmas holiday and a mad rush to finish everything in January before the long Chinese New Year break in late January or February.)

But let's imagine that your failure to maintain your resolution is entirely due to unforeseen events: you are determined to go to the gym, but then you land a huge work project which requires most of your energy and all of your time. Or you were going to lose weight, but you started learning to bake and have discovered your superpower is making delicious cookies. Neither a valuable work contract or the ability to produce perfectly-crunchy-or-chewy chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven whenever you want are bad things, and maybe if you'd known about their emergence ahead of time you could have planned your resolutions accordingly, or at least been better prepared for the struggle of maintaining your resolutions in spite of them.

This ignorance (not stupidity--ignorance is not knowing something, stupidity is when knowing it wouldn't help you) of what the new year might bring can in some ways be considered a form of mercy. My examples above are positive, but all too often what lies ahead as we face every new year is unforeseen hardship and pain. Perhaps the global geopolitical situation will become more unstable, straining the economy and threatening war. Perhaps sickness or disease will afflict you, your friends, or family members. Perhaps you'll simply find yourself unable to meet your goals through factors seemingly beyond your control, and slowly slip into ennervating ennui.

All these things and many more are possible, and we know that they will all happen at some point in the future, as a matter of statistics. This is the world we live in; we never know when misfortune may strike, and that inability to know can be faced in various ways. (Libraries of books and articles have been written about how to face the unknown without debilitating stress, many of which can be encapsulated in Paul's reminder to "be anxious for nothing".)

Making Impossible Decisions

With the future tantalizingly guessable but also unknown, many decisions must be made without knowing the outcome. As an INTP on the Myers-Briggs personality indicator, I know that I have a tendency to delay making a decision until I have all the relevant information to help me decide, the problem being that a) sometimes you simply can't know all the relevant information, and b) sometimes if you wait long enough to try to know everything, you've missed the decision-making window.
Life is unfair; sometimes the only effective decision is one made before you know how rightly to decide. It's still a little surprising even now when I do that and turn out to have chosen well; it seems like any decision made before you could know enough to make it would be wrong, yet that's often not the case.

People have different ways to make that kind of "stab into the unknown" decision; some like to "go with their gut feeling" (this depends on having a healthy/reliable gut in the literal, physical sense--anxiety and depression can make your gut feeling a bad and unreliable guide, something I have discovered only after many years trapped in the doubt-labyrinth). This is a form of taking personal responsibility for the decision, and for people with strong intuition and the "knack" for making good rapid decisions, the results can seem almost like magic.

By contrast, some prefer to offload the decision-making stress by flipping a coin or using some other "this is random yet maybe fate/divine providence is out there guiding it" method. This is more natural for people with a more external locus of control--they feel they're not really in control of most things to begin with, so every decision is somewhat arbitrary. I am the opposite, with a very internal locus of control--I believe there are very few things in life that you don't have some measure of control over, it's only a question of whether you are willing to really consider all of your options, including those most people aren't willing to consider, and deal with whatever consequences may result. (The upside to this is the capacity to see options and make choices and achieve results which are not even on the radar of many people; the downside is knowing that basically all the bad things that happen to you are your own fault, and not being able to externalize the blame for your problems without knowing you are being hypocritical in doing so. Some degree of self-loathing is the risk of making better use of your gift of free will.)

Other people (very commonly, here in Taiwan) try to get around the unknown future problem at its source, by resorting to a wide variety of fortune-telling methods. There are entire classes of fortune telling here largely unknown in the West, using birds and dangling pendants and the dates of one's birth and characters in one's name, and tossing little red crescent-shaped wooden blocks (jiaobei) at temples to see how they land.

All fortune-telling is forbidden by scripture, of course, as it's random self-deception and ex-post-facto rationalization at best (and real contact with dark spiritual realities at worst), and in every case an attempt to face an unknown future with less or no need for faith or God's presence and guidance (or for learning discernment and wisdom). God wants us not to know the future, because that's how we learn to trust. We want to know the future, because trusting is hard and can hurt. It's more or less the sin of Eden; we want to know what God knows so we can make decisions as we deem best, vs. trust and obedience to someone other than Self.

Hindsight Is Not Invalidation

Another reason knowing the future would be harmful, is because that knowledge is a "collapsed" version of reality compared to experience. You do not live a year instantaneously. The troubles and hardships are spaced out with joys and relief. Looking back with hindsight is different from knowing all the ramifications of a decision ahead of time, because knowing them ahead of time would compress them all together, a giant bundle of future pain, whereas experiencing them in reality takes place over time, where there is solace and recovery and lessons learned. Living in time means you only need to confront and deal with each problem as it comes, whereas the ability to see all the future problems together means mentally confronting all of them at the same time, which would make any decision impossibly daunting.

When I was making the decision to move to Taiwan to do long-term missions work, I had no idea how my life here was going to be. It turned out that I had mostly rational expectations (for those few expectations I dared to have, knowing how dangerous they can be) but I was also wrong about nearly everything: most of what I was looking forward to fell through, didn't work out like it was supposed to, or was taken away rather painfully. Why were my expectations so far off-base? Partly through things I could have known but didn't know to ask about (the "you don't know what you don't know" problem), and partly through things I could never have known or predicted ahead of time (I have a strange talent for getting myself into frustrating situations that no one I know has ever encountered before).

I think if I could have foreseen all the various difficulties and challenges I would encounter as a missionary ahead of time, I would almost certainly never have left the U.S. Yet that would have been the wrong decision, and coming was the right decision, which I could make because I was spared from knowing what would have made deciding correctly impossible for me.

When seeking God's will to come here, I did not foresee all the difficulties and obstacles I would face, but I did receive very clear confirmation to go. It was not wrong for God to decline to inform me of what would happen if I followed His leading, because it would have stopped me from obeying.

In terms of making the decision itself, I was blessed to have the strong confirmation that not every missionary receives. Yet that is not a necessary condition for making the decision, since with the Great Commission given to all followers of Christ, deciding to serve the Kingdom of God in a full-time capacity is never odds with the revealed will of God (who will open and close doors according to His hidden will for the particulars, whether we like and understand it or not).

Though we sometimes act as if the default is to do nothing, and that in special circumstances, some "super Christians" or the "specially called" can work at the Great Commission and spreading the Kingdom, the Bible teaches the opposite; the default is what God already told us all to do. I spent a lot of time worrying that being a missionary to Taiwan might not be God's will, until finally I made the decision to do it, and simply asked Him to close the door if it was not His will, and close it hard enough that I would absolutely not be able to get through it. Then it was simply a matter of crawling over every obstacle until I got here. (At which point the obstacles got taller and thornier. The reward for endurance is more weight on the next set, when strength and not comfort is the goal)

If It's Not Wrong, Pray, And Do It

No amount of hardship encountered after the fact can make a decision wrong purely on the basis that there is hardship (unless it was a comfort-based decision). That is a blessing for we time-bound creatures; we can "swear to our own hurt and not change"--make irrevocable decisions which cause us pain yet still honor them; Psalm 15 calls this a mark of someone who may dwell in God's presence. Because the future is unknown to us, we can make correct decisions which we might not be able to bring ourselves to make if we knew how hard the consequences would be, yet still not give up.

The idea that "God won't give you more than you can handle" is false and a lie; God will absolutely give you more than you can handle, so that you have no other recourse but to take refuge in Him, or reject Him. Those are the only two eternal choices any human has.

But it's one thing to make a godly decision, then need to rely on God to survive the consequences, and another to know how hard it's going to be and still make the decision. Ignorance is a protection for the weak in a sinful world; those who know a lot have to be much stronger to handle that knowledge and still move forward, and that strength often only comes through suffering.

Yet the Bible exists so that we should not be ignorant of those things God considers it necessary for us to know and act on, and it teaches us not to stay willingly ignorant, but to seek wisdom and get understanding. And while scripture is deep and sometimes complex, on the whole the Bible is not that complicated when it comes to what we should and shouldn't do. We no longer live under Old Testament law, but one sin of legalism in any era or church is that it destroys the freedom that God offers us: The idea of "Thou shalt not..." is actually incredibly liberating, because "Thou shalt..." would confine us to only what was mentioned. But we have freedom in Christ to do whatever is not sin, for His glory.

So that is my advice to you as we all face the daunting prospect of the year-which-comes-after-2017: make right decisions, and trust God to walk you through whatever difficulties may arise. And if you are a believer* who wants to do something that scripture does not condemn anywhere (specifically or in principle), if you have asked God to reveal His will to you, and He has not said No, then ask Him to close the door if it is not His will yet you can't know that, and move ahead with confidence that He will direct your paths. As I was told when in the middle of a tough decision once: "You can't steer a parked car."

(*--And if you are not a believer, 2018 is the perfect year to stop holding out against what everyone from astrophysicists to a child in Sunday school knows is true, and begin your path of faith to God. The Gospel of John is a great place to start--the trail of atheists who set out to disprove the Bible and later believed it is rather impressive.) 

The Church stagnates because we make non-action the default, afraid we might accidentally do the wrong good thing. We should be more concerned with not doing the good God has set in front of us. The world needs it in 2018 more than ever.