A Practical and Engaging Guide for Changing the Way We Seek God's Will How do we know God's will for our lives? This question lies at the heart of Christian life. And yet, attempting to understand our greater purpose can become a source of frustration as we look for help when making important life decisions. Spiritual retreat leader and Episcopal priest Fred Schmidt reveals how we can better recognize the difference between God's will and our own, deepen our ability to hear God's voice, and sharpen our powers of discernment.

Foreword

xi

Introduction On Opening an Invitation

xv

I-Questions and God-Questions

1

(30)

Triage Theology

31

(32)

Signs and Wonders

63

(36)

Proving the Will of God

99

(30)

Listening for the Voice of God

129

(34)

We-Questions

163

(26)

Gifts and Graces

189

(16)

Putting It All Together: Envisioning a New Life in God

205

(18)

Acknowledgments

223

(4)

Notes

227

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What God Wants for Your Life
Changing the Way We Seek God's Will

Chapter One

I-Questions and
God-Questions

When you fathom the life of things and of conditionality, youreach the indissoluble; when you dispute the life of things andof conditionality, you wind up before the nothing; when youconsecrate life you encounter the living God.
-- Martin Buber

Tradition holds that in the deserts of Egypt a small group of mensought out Anthony the hermit, who was widely regarded for his saneand sensible approach to life. They wanted to know how to achievespiritual perfection. Their conversation began in the evening and, itis said, lasted most of the night.

Anxious perhaps to demonstrate their own wisdom, they quicklyoffered answers to the question they themselves had raised withoutallowing the old hermit to speak. One argued that fasting and thekeeping of vigils would accomplish the desired goal. Another recommendedabandoning attachments to this world. Some thought thatthe key to achieving perfection lay in solitude and secrecy. Still othersurged the opposite, recommending that perfection be sought inengagement with the world and the practice of charity.

Finally, Anthony spoke. "All the things that you have spokenabout are necessary and helpful to those thirsting for God. But those who have been most zealous have often suddenly fallen prey to illusion.Discernment is that which above all else leads to God. It keepsus from presumption and excessive fervor on the right and from carelessness,sin and a sluggishness of spirit on the left."

I am convinced that we ourselves are much like Anthony's interrogators.We are anxious to know the will of God and yet far too anxiousto supply the answers without listening. What should I do? Whatam I able to do? How can I prepare? Where will I go? Moreover, inour fast-paced ADHD world we want answers to these questions now.

So, as we seek to find God's will, instead of turning to the anxiousquestions that we so often ask and answer without listening, letme suggest that we begin by asking different, deeper questions. Indoing so, I am convinced that we can find a greater measure of spiritualbalance and a way to nurture lives marked by greater signifi-cance. When we come back to the questions about ourselves—and Ipromise you that we will—I am also hopeful that we will have betteranswers. To get there, however, I want to do four things:

Introduce a basic distinction between "I-questions" and"God-questions"

In light of that distinction, define what I mean by the practiceof discernment

Give you two basic strategies for asking your own Godquestions

Illustrate why the distinction matters

Distinguishing Between I-Questions and God-Questions

Twelve of us had been asked to serve on the senior staff of WashingtonNational Cathedral. The number, I think, was a fluke. Besides,we all reported to a thirteenth member of the staff who served as ourimmediate supervisor.

In those early days we did lots of team-building exercises. Wejumped off a tower, each of us strapped into a harness hanging froma zip-wire, and went hurtling down a mountainside—okay, hillside—one by one. We went on trust-walks, blindfolded and led byanother member of the staff. And we took the Myers-Briggs Inventoryto discover a sense of how each of us responded to the world aroundus. We were a diverse bunch, and we came from a variety of workworlds, including not just the academy and the church but theworlds of advertising, nonprofit work, accounting, business administration,social work, and public relations.

But almost all of us also shared a frightening common denominator.Out of the twelve, eleven of us were firstborn children, and the onewho was not was an only child. When he discovered the ugly truthabout our team, our supervisor dropped his head into his open handsand wailed, "I don't believe it! I'm working with a group of peoplewho have spent their entire lives asking, 'Can I do extra credit?'"

First children may be particularly bad about it—I know that Iam—but we all live in an increasingly first-person-singular worldwhere questions about extra credit dominate. We value and celebrateindividual enterprise. We reinforce it in the way we market highereducation, and we surround ourselves with the language and consciousnessof personal initiative. We live in a world of applications,aptitude tests, and examinations designed to test our preparation forthe solitary achievements that lie ahead, and we are ushered into aworld that is deeply shaped by asking and answering I-questions.

I remember it well. At times the succession of challenges issuedby parents, teachers, and others felt like an invitation to adulthood—a well-meaning welcome to the world where decisions were madeand problems were solved. At other times those challenges felt likegauntlet with unidentified traps nestled among the ones that were alreadyclearly labeled. The effort to graduate from high school gaveway to the task of finishing an undergraduate degree. Finishing thatdegree gave way to applying for graduate programs. Finishing a graduatedegree gave way to anxiety over finding a job. Through it all thefirst-person-singular dominated, and far from seeming selfish or selfabsorbed,overachieving, action-oriented lives and good answers tofirst-person-singular questions seemed to be the measure of responsibility.

What God Wants for Your Life
Changing the Way We Seek God's Will. Copyright © by Frederick Schmidt. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Excerpted from What God Wants for Your Life: Changing the Way We Seek God's Will by Frederick W. Schmidt, Frederick W. Schmidt
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