Heart and mind

So in the GROW class, we talked about the act of discernment, and started off by defining the word (a necessary custom).

dis cern ment: the quality of being able to grasp and comprehend what is obscure.

The definition alone helps clear some things up. For instance, it's not discernment when there is a direct revelation from God. If He says, "Go into the city and you will be told what to do" (See Acts 9), then there was nothing to discern. Or maybe you're given a choice, like where to take a job, and you don't have a sense of God's leading you. That's not discernment either. Our study leader explained that it's like your dad on your birthday, and he offers to cook either hot dogs or burgers--whichever you prefer. Neither is necessarily better than the other.

Sometimes too, the choice we are to make is clear, but we don't want to make the Godly choice. It was mentioned that if Samson (the strongest man), David (the man after God's heart) and Solomon (the wisest man) all chose wrongly, don't think that we are immune. We're just as human.

Discernment has to do with a few things:

• Deepening our faith; we make a decision without all the information. Note that the "lamp unto our feet" is not a spotlight down the path again.
• Learning about ourselves. Learning about our emotions (boy do I understand this one!), or are intentions, etc.
• Building a relationship of trust. "God is not a dispatcher of answers from a faraway office, but an up-close-and-personal being who wants to converse back and forth with us. God is relentlessly relational, inviting us into an interactive life so that discernment and decision making are fleshed out within ongoing nudges within our everyday life with God."*
• Learning to recognize the voice of our Shepherd, despite the constant talking of other influences.

We focused on the final bullet, and mentioned that there isn't a formula. Not the formula word again! But it's interesting how so many people have written so many books on how to hear God's voice, or our friends just tell us to pray about it and God will show us the way (mmhmm.. guilty as charged). We expect that if there are all sorts of other things in this world that use a formula (fixing a car, shoveling snow, and so on), then we should be able to relate to God in such a manner. Until of course, we remember that we can't relate to people formulaically, much less God.**

Why? Because we are emotional beings. Logic is important, but it can not stand alone.

The Christian spiritual heritage takes emotion very seriously, particularly the interplay between mind and heart. Our emotions define our experience and give weight to our convictions. They give meaning to our lives. They reflect our fundamental values. By its very nature, an internal response to the inner witness of the Spirit of God requires that we develop the capacity to be attentive to what is happening to us emotionally.***

Remember Jesus' emotions of anger in the temple, and weeping at Lazarus' tomb. Remember that when we pray, we bring our whole selves to the conversation--our emotions and circumstances. You can't just throw emotion out the door in times of decisions, just as you can't throw logic out the door either. They work together, but I would say it is most critical to talk about how much more emotion has been left to the wayside in our decision-making processes.

I'm off to take a test for something for my future. Please pray for me. I'll write more later.

* Johnson, Jan. "Discernment Within a Conversational Life." Conversations: A Forum for Authentic Transformation.
** Spiritual disciplines are about setting up an environment for God to work in our lives, but doing them does not mean that He will give us an answer we are looking for. I often find we never find what we're looking for, but He shows us something better.
*** Smith, Gordon T. The Voice of Jesus.