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Podcast: Why Is Making Decisions So Hard? (Aimee Joseph)

January 24, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

The Crushing Weight of Decision-Making

In today's episode, Aimee Joseph discusses why we struggle to make decisions, where God's will fits into the topic, and how we can work on our efforts to make God-honoring choices in everyday life.

Demystifying Decision-Making

Demystifying Decision-Making

Aimee Joseph

With the philosophy that “as we shape our decisions, our decisions shape us,” Aimee Joseph teaches readers how to worship and draw closer to Christ through their daily decisions.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:02 - Anxiety and Stress in Decision-Making

Matt Tully
Aimee, thank you so much for joining me today on the Crossway Podcast.

Aimee Joseph
It’s such a joy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk about decision-making—how to think about it, how to do it, why it’s so hard for us sometimes. But before we go there, I wonder if we could start with the question, Have you ever struggled with stress or anxiety related to decision-making in your own life?

Aimee Joseph
Yes. Absolutely. In fact, when our children were little, it felt like it was hard to even decide what to make for lunch. Life was so fast-paced and I didn’t have time to think. My brain was exhausted all the time. Even just what to make for my children to eat was difficult. Or, there’s the cereal aisle. I’ve had friends that have come back from being in foreign countries as missionaries and they said they literally broke down in tears in the cereal aisle because it’s just so many choices.

Matt Tully
And we just take it for granted.

Aimee Joseph
Right. We don’t even realize it. It’s the white noise of our lives. Decisions are everywhere. Even think about the way you order at Starbucks. The possibilities are endless. The joke in college was that our town had nothing but a college and some horses and some cows, but we had two Waffle Houses. The Waffle House menu has an astounding number of choices—something like one million—of ways to have your hash browns prepared. That’s just the hash browns! That’s an astounding number. I think decision fatigue is real. I think in certain seasons it’s more or less overwhelming. I think in seasons of grief decision-making is incredibly hard. With just simple decisions you don’t even want to think about those things because your heart is so overtaken with trying to think about the heavy thing that you’re processing. It’s very overwhelming to be a caregiver and make decisions, to be a mother and make decisions, to be a college student and make decisions. It’s a lot that our minds and our souls process on the daily.

Matt Tully
Obviously, a lot of those things are people, let alone Christians, have been dealing with since the very beginning, but do you think there’s something more unique about our cultural moment right now that has perhaps forced on us more decisions than we used to have to make, leading to an increase in anxiety and stress?

Aimee Joseph
Absolutely. In the book I do a quick overview survey asking how people have approached decision-making, culturally, from the past. There was a point where people used to think that decisions were made in the liver, and so they would do all kinds of crazy things to their livers—just crazy stuff! So, people have been asking these questions for a really long time. One of the other things that I found most interesting in the process of writing this book was how big of a deal what kind of culture you come from and how that makes a difference on the way you decide and the amount of decisions that you make. There’s this great book called The 3D Gospel by Jayson Georges. He makes a distinction between how the gospel is heard and received in three different kinds of cultures. He talks about honor/shame cultures, guilt/innocence cultures, and fear/power cultures. In the West and in our moment right now, we’re a smattering of all of those, which is strange, but typically, if you live in a guilt/innocence culture in a Western civilization, you have a lot of autonomy in decision. We live in a high leisure culture. Compared to the rest of the world, we live in an incredibly rich time. So, we have choices that no other cultures have had in the past. I reference that my husband is Indian and his parents were raised in India. They were given two choices: Do you want to be a nurse, or do you want to be a teacher (if you’re a woman)? For him, his dad had been an engineer, his father’s father had been an engineer, so he was probably going to be an engineer. They didn’t make as many choices. They didn’t make the choice of who they would marry; they were arranged in marriage. And they’re doing well many, many years into their marriage. We don’t live in a communal culture anymore where our location determines our identity or where our family determines our identity and our choices. We are not limited by those things. We have transportation that flattens the world; we have technology that flattens the world and opens up to us all of these choices. And we live in a culture that has enough wealth to be able to make a lot of those things happen. A lot of families, even in our own country, don’t have those choices. So, that’s the dizziness part of the freedom that we live in.

Matt Tully
Why do you think that is? Even if some of us feel stressed out by those decisions and options at times, I would be hard-pressed to think that many of us would say, I guess I’d prefer to give up all that stuff. I’d rather have an arranged marriage or be told what I needed to do for a career. Why do you think it is that having more options isn’t always a less stressful, more fulfilling dynamic?

Aimee Joseph
I think part of it is the complexity of our culture right now. The irony of all this is that we know, as believers, that putting man at the center—putting self at the center—is what caused the fall. When we say the fall, we mean four-fold fall: break between God and man, break between man and man, break between man and himself, and break between man and the earth (the created order). Putting man, or self, at the center created all of that. Somehow I think our culture thinks if we keep self at the center, we can fix these things. I think that’s where it gets wonky. I don’t think that choice in and of itself is wrong, but we don’t have a framework anymore in our culture of understood and absolute truth. We don’t have any anchoring as a whole. As believers we do, so I think what we’re doing is we’re putting a crushing weight on self that it was never meant to carry. Underneath all of that is this idea that you are the sum of your choices, that you get to define your identity, you be whatever you want to be. That is the thing I think we rub up against. I think that’s what sounds so sweet. It’s like cotton candy: it sounds so good and it tastes good for a second, but it has no substance. It doesn’t hold up. In fact, it creates crushing anxiety for people.

Matt Tully
It seems like for this moment in particular the cultural mantra is not just “You be you,” but “You make you.” In your decisions, you have the power to create yourself in whatever image you want to be created in.

Aimee Joseph
Yes, and that’s a lot of power to give a self. That’s a lot of power to give any self, but a young, developing self; or an older, hurting self—that’s a lot of power. I think we don’t recognize that. We don’t recognize how much we need a creator. We need a standard. We need help to make decisions. We need to know that our decisions are not the end all be all, that there’s One who’s guiding our decisions. Just that idea of God being sovereign and providentially caring for his people, I think those are truths that we take for granted as believers all the time.

07:37 - God’s Sovereignty and Our Responsibility

Matt Tully
Help us think about that because that’s one of the most classic conundrums that Christians often struggle with to try to wrap our minds around, with varying degrees of success or satisfaction. How should we understand our power, ability, and responsibility to make decisions—to think carefully about choices—with a belief that God is sovereign—that he really is in control and nothing is happening apart from his will? How do you bring those two things together?

Aimee Joseph
In one of the early chapters of the book I talk about the dilemma of decisions. It’s dizzying and it’s a dilemma. It’s not just a dilemma because there are a lot of them and it’s exhausting; it’s a dilemma because when we try to think about it we bump into this mystery that our limited brains cannot wrap themselves around. That mystery is this: the Scriptures tell us two things at the same exact time—man is a responsible moral agent in which he makes real choices with real decisions in real time with real consequences—and yet, God is a sovereign God who has ordained those decisions. That is astounding. What we want to do when we come to mystery is we want to either explain it away or make it an either/or. We just want to truncate it because we don’t want to bow before mystery, although the Christian faith is replete with them. It is full of them, and so we want to go either/or. I think we have times where we go either way. I’ll be counseling students or women in the church and they’re weighing so heavily on man’s responsibility that they just need to be reminded that God is sovereign. The God who told the oceans This is where you stop and Mountains, this is how high you will be, and the God who ordained gravity to keep our feet on the earth, he’s in control. They need to be reminded that there are other people in other times, or the same people in different times, who say God is sovereign—we hear this all the time with college students—God is sovereign. He’s going to figure out my job. He’s going to take care of it when I graduate. And I’m like, Yeah, but you have to write a cover letter! God is sovereign, but you apply to jobs! He uses your work. We tend to make it an either/or, but it’s a both/and. There are a couple of things that have helped me with that. First, A. W. Tozer says that when a non-believer thinks about the sovereignty of God, they say Oh my goodness! I’m just a pawn! But when a believer understands God’s sovereignty, he exclaims I’m a child! That is what God’s sovereignty means when we make decisions. Yet, we are responsible. J. I. Packer, in his book Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, talks about this idea that it’s called an antinomy. We tend to call it a paradox, but it’s actually an antinomy.

Matt Tully
What is the difference there?

Aimee Joseph
In essence, Packer says an antinomy are two apparent truths that seem contradictory. The example for that would be light. When I love reading about physicists—

Matt Tully
Coming back to science here.

Aimee Joseph
Yes, it’s in me a little bit! Not enough to be good at it, but enough to dabble. For Einstein and all his physicist friends, they were trying to figure out what is the nature of light. One would do an experiment, and they would say, It is a wave. It is 100% wave. It’s got to be wave, and everyone would sway that way. And then the next physicist would do an experiment and say, No, I don’t think it's a wave. I think it’s particle. It was back and forth and back and forth, and then they finally realized, No! It’s both! It was both at the exact same time. That helps me get my mind around the fact that something can be both. Light behaves like a wave and it behaves like a particle. God is sovereign; man is responsible. A. W. Tozer uses another analogy and it is that a bird needs two wings to fly. He says if a bird just flaps one wing, he doesn’t get anywhere. So, God is sovereign, and I am responsible. When you flap both wings you can fly. When you only have one little wing flapping all the time, it doesn’t work. Again, we’re not going to understand these things until we get to glory, but that’s one of the reasons that decision-making is confusing because we’re going, Did I really choose to put on a blue shirt today, or did God sovereignly ordain that I would choose to put on a blue shirt today? Do I really have a choice or do I not? I think one way to help with that is to pull back and reframe the problem as a privilege. It is a privilege given from God that we would be able to make decisions. It is part of being stamped in his image. That we would be cognizant of the fact that we’re making decisions is a gift from God. It just helped me in this process to pull back and push the idea of decision-making through the framework of creation, fall, redemption, and glory. When you do it like that, in God’s created order he said, I don’t want to make robots. I want to make a people that will choose to worship me, that will love me willingly. I’m going to give them real choice. In the garden he gave Adam and Eve real choice. That was an incredible privilege given to Adam and Eve, stamped in the image of a triune God, to be able to make decisions. Fall: we botched it. As we said earlier, we put ourselves right smack in the center of it and said, No, thanks. You’re not my authority. I’ll be my authority. I’ll decide what’s good and evil. I want to know. We put ourselves in the center of that, made an atrocious decision, and have been experiencing it ever since then. We made a terrible choice, and there was a terrible consequence to that choice. From that time, our choosers were broken. We weren’t going to choose what was right and good. We were a broken people. The Old Testament shows that. We see God saying, Here it is, Moses. I’m setting before you two ways. One leads to life; one leads to death. One leads to blessing; one leads to curse. Even he (Moses) is failing at doing it. So we’re set up for this. We’re given the right to choose, we botch it up, we keep choosing wrongly, and then Christ comes. He chooses to come to this earth and step in as the Incarnate One, and he makes choices that are always and only honoring to God. He makes these choices, but he gets the sum of our bad choices. He makes every right choice, and he chooses to lay his life down. No one takes his life from him. He says, I lay it down. I’m choosing to pick up my cross. He dies so that we can choose again, so that we can make decisions again that honor him, to make a way back to God. Because of redemption, we are not the sum of our choices anymore; we are the sum of his righteous choices. Rather than letting us live in licentiousness and do whatever we want, that frees us and compels us to say, I want to, and I’m free to, make choices that honor God, to enjoy my agency that God had given me and that Christ has bought back for me. One day there will be a time where we will only make good choices, where we will only make choices in light of the Father and his glory and not ourselves and our comfort or our fear. It just helped me see it as a privilege rather than starting with it as a problem. It is a privilege that we are made in the image of God, that he would let us choose.

15:51 - But What Is the Right Decision?

Matt Tully
Speak to the Christian listening right now who says, I get that. I believe that that’s all true, but it doesn’t feel like a privilege. These decisions that I’m having to make often feel very stressful and overwhelming. What’s more, it’s not just that they’re overwhelming, it’s that I don’t actually know what the right answer is most of the time. If this is such a good thing that God wants me to do, why doesn’t he make it more clear what the right answer is? What would you say to that?

Aimee Joseph
I say amen! I’m right there with you! I think I wrote this book because of that—this doesn’t feel like a privilege; it feels really confusing! Then you get married, have children, and then it multiplies. And then they’re making choices that you can’t control. It’s insane. So, I’m right there with you. I know this is a not-satisfying Barnes and Noble answer, but God is deeply and intimately concerned with the process of decision-making, not just the product of decision-making. We are a product culture. We love the end product, we love the end cap, we want to be done with something and check it off our list. I’m just afraid that God is not most like that. I think he does care about the choices that we make, but I think he’s deeply concerned with the processing time that he gets with us in making decisions. I use this as an example: my children love rocks. I don’t know if it’s a boy phase or maybe they’re just nerdy and into science.

Matt Tully
No, I think all kids just want rocks.

Aimee Joseph
Yes, we have like seven rock books at our house, and I’m a nerd so I’m totally all about it. They went through a phase where they just wanted all the shiny, polished rocks. I could have taken them to Balboa Park, which is a museum kind of like the Washington Mall, and bought them very overpriced, ridiculously shiny, polished rocks from the museum bookstore. They would have appreciated them and they would have been fine. But instead, I thought, My children are into this. I want to get time with my children. So, much to my husband’s chagrin, I bought us a rock tumbler. I don’t know if you know this, but they are the loudest (don’t buy one), most energy-consuming thing you’ve ever done. It’s not like a quick, overnight thing. It’s weeks! You change the grit of the things that are in there.

Matt Tully
Was it a hand-cranking one?

Aimee Joseph
No, this was an electronic one that was so loud and it was in the garage for weeks. We actually stopped mid-way through the process and said they were semi-polished and they’re fine for us.

Matt Tully
And then you went back to the museum and bought those polished rocks.

Aimee Joseph
The analogy obviously breaks down, but the point is it was because I wanted to spend time with my kids. They treasure those rocks way more than the shiny ones I could have bought them because they are their rocks and we did it together. I think similarly, God appreciates the process with his children. He wants the process time. He wants the intimacy that comes from making choices and inviting us in. He wants to make us image-bearers. He wants to make us those who have, as Paul says in Corinthians, the mind of Christ. That’s a process of making real decisions and having real consequences and going, I’m not going to do that next time. I’ve learned from my mistake. God is into the process because he’s making us ready to be with him in glory. I think that making decisions is one of the things that presses us into the throne of God, that presses us into the lap of God, that lays us out in dependence before God. Jehoshaphat, I do believe, in Chronicles has an army coming for him. He lays out his plans before the Lord and basically just says, Lord, we don’t know what to do, but our eyes are on you. Jehoshaphat says that, but Asa is the one who had all these plans and had all these counselors asking Should we go into this battle? and Should we not go into this battle? Then, it says he just laid them out before the Lord in dependence and prayed. I just think that process of gathering the information, laying things out before the Lord—I think he’s really delighted in that dependence that comes from that. Not in a Ha ha, you’re dependent on me kind of way, but in a You’re being trained. You’re becoming mature and you’re learning how to think like a believer, and you have real agency in the kingdom of God.

Matt Tully
I’m always surprised that even as I know and believe these truths about God and about myself and my decisions and his power, I think for a lot of us if you take a step back and look at your process, we are often very slow to lay all these things out before God. We do everything else we can do to try to figure it out, and then as a very last resort we say, Oh, maybe I should go to God in this.

Aimee Joseph
Maybe I should pray and ask the Lord what he would do.

21:01 - Advice for the Indecisive

Matt Tully
What would you say to the person who says, I have tried to do both of those things. I’ve really tried to take this to God, to study his Scriptures. I’ve tried to get counsel from other people and I’ve made my two-column list of pros and cons. I’m still just not sure what to do. What advice would you give to that person?

Aimee Joseph
That’s a layered question. I think one of the things that I talk about early on in the book is understanding and defining before you even talk about God’s will. That’s ultimately what we’re trying to ask: God, what’s your will for this specific situation? One of the things that is helpful and that we have to understand—and it doesn’t take away decision-making, but it puts it in its proper place—and that’s the distinction between God’s revealed will and his hidden will. I was just sitting in on a talk downstairs and the speaker quoted from 1 Thessalonians where Paul says: “This is the will of God for your life: your sanctification.” I know the answer. His revealed will for you is his word, that you would obey his word. We gloss over that because that’s not the answer we want to hear. We don’t want to hear that.

Matt Tully
It’s not specific enough.

Aimee Joseph
I want to know if I’m supposed to go here or not go here, major in this or not major in this, adopt this child or not adopt this child, foster or not foster. But we can’t just gloss over that verse because we have to remember that the promise is this: everything that we need for life and godliness is contained in the Scriptures. God says, You have everything you need contained here that you need to know to live a life that is holy and honoring to me. The writer of Hebrews said the word of God is living and active, sharper than a double-edged sword. It pierces. We know that all Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, reproof, training, and righteousness, that we might be equipped for every good work. So, God’s will is not that confusing; it’s his word. We know what God ultimately wants. He wants us to walk in obedience to him and be conformed to his image. That’s significant. That’s his revealed will: his word. That’s nuanced and it’s confusing and there are different genres and there’s tons to talk about there. But then there’s this idea of his hidden will. His hidden will would be that you can only see it looking backwards. It basically is providential ordaining and care for all of our decisions. It’s Romans 8:28: all things are going to work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose. The thing about providence is that you can’t see it until you’re looking backwards. You can’t know his hidden will until it’s already happened. And then you look back and you go, I see why I went to the college that I went to because I grew and was discipled and nurtured there in my faith and I met my husband there. When I was making that college decision, I did not know that that was God’s hidden will for me. All I knew was that I wanted to walk with God and I needed to find a place where I could go to college, and there were lots of choices where I could do that. But looking back, I can see God’s providential hand in sovereignly allowing that decision. This doesn’t change the fact that we still make decisions, but it helps us to go, I am wasting my time if I am trying to figure out the hidden will of God. I find out the will of God as I walk in his word and make choices.

Matt Tully
So, would you say for the revealed will, is it the case that we shouldn’t always be thinking, I got to find that one exact right path?

Aimee Joseph
Yes!

Matt Tully
Experientially, would you say there’s more freedom for us in decision-making?

Aimee Joseph
There is a lot of freedom. Obviously, when it comes to what the Scriptures have clearly prohibited, that’s not a place of Christian liberty. But there are a lot of areas of Christian liberty. I wish I had my notes with me, but Jerry Sittser basically says that for the believer who is walking in the revealed will of God, trying to follow his word in the Spirit, not living in unconfessed sin, and seeking counsel—all the things that we know are the right answers—he says there are a thousand choices that could be God’s will. The one that becomes God’s will for them is the one that they make a choice to do. It’s this idea of seeing God’s will looking backwards. We do not know his hidden will until it happens. This is what Moses in Deuteronomy 29:29 says—he’s talking to the people of God—and he says, “for the secret things belong to God.” I do not know how many days I have on this earth. I do not know when Christ is going to return. I do not know the condition of my children’s health for the future. I do not know a thousand things. Those are hidden things that belong to God, and I will know them as they unfold. So Moses says, “the hidden things belong to God, but the revealed things belong to us and to our children, that we might obey them and keep them forever.” So, the distinction between the hidden and the revealed will of God, it doesn’t solve the problem, but it helps us to know I am hitting my head against a wall if I am trying to understand the hidden will of God. It should give us freedom and levity.

Matt Tully
Would you say that sometimes we just need to pick?

Aimee Joseph
Yes. It’s as simple as that. I think there’s a process. In the book we talk about how just like when you’re painting a room, the preparation for painting a room is far more painstaking and annoying than actually painting the room. You have to get all the stuff out, you have to put the tape down, you have to do all the trim, put the tarps down—

Matt Tully
Get your brushes.

Aimee Joseph
It’s so much prep work, and then you paint the wall. The same thing is true I think with decision-making. I think there’s a lot of prep work that goes into it. I think there’s a lot of praying, fasting, asking the Lord for help, seeking wise and godly counsel, gathering the facts, doing your pros and cons lists. But there are times—not always—when having done all of that, you simply make a choice and there’s nothing wrong with that. Again, this is after having gone through the right steps. For example, Should I drink alcohol if I’m underage? No, you shouldn’t. That’s not a decision. There’s no decision to be made there. The Scriptures are super clear: you should obey the laws of the land. But if a student is coming down to a choice and they have to choose between snowy Montana campus and a sunny San Diego campus and they hate the sun, there’s nothing wrong with them saying, I think I will go to Montana State because I love snow. There’s nothing wrong with that; that’s a good thing. I think sometimes as believers we’re scared of desire. We don’t know where to put it. Some people lead only with desire in decisions—I want this; therefore, it must be true. I want it badly; therefore, it must be right. But the other extreme to that is, It must be too good to be true. If I want this, it’s too easy*.

Matt Tully
Like, that’s not a good enough reason for me to move in that direction.

Aimee Joseph
Right. When there’s a tie like that—actually St. Ignatius talks about this—spiritual consolation and spiritual desolation. I wouldn’t say that’s a good starting point. You don’t start with, What makes me feel consoled? when thinking about a decision, but this is like a tie breaker. After having gone through the process and sifting through the word. For example, there was a point when I graduated college where I thought I could be on a team doing some scientific research. There was an opportunity to do that, or there was an opportunity to do some ministry. Either one of those could have honored the Lord. Either one of those is right and good. So, the thought of sitting in a little cubicle and looking at a screen all day made me want to cry—that’s spiritual desolation. The thought of getting to disciple women and study the Bible made my heart come alive—that’s spiritual consolation. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Both of those could have been honoring to God.

28:55 - Does What I Desire Matter?

Matt Tully
How big a factor should our desires and inclinations—and the idea of personal fulfillment even—how big of a role should that play in our decision-making? Obviously, let’s put the caveats in place and say that shouldn’t be the only dominant thing, but do you think we often downplay the role of that in the decisions we’re going to make in our life? Or do you think it’s the other way?

Aimee Joseph
I think it depends on the personality and the moment, but I do think there are tendencies to do both. I even wrestled with putting that concept of spiritual consolation and spiritual desolation—even though it’s hundreds of years old—in this book because our culture is so You do you. If you feel it, it is right. Chase after whatever you desire. But that’s not the Christian way of life. So I think there’s a fear of sounding like the culture in that, but I do think God has planted desires in different people. I am always astounded when I talk to people about their work and what they do. They light up talking about it. I have a friend who is working for Google and doing really cool stuff programming and data—things that my brain can’t even comprehend—and he just literally talks so fast (like I am right now) and he just gets excited. I’m like, God wired you to do this!. I have another friend and when she was in second grade she asked for a filing cabinet for Christmas. Who does that?

Matt Tully
That’s organized!

Aimee Joseph
Because God had wired her a certain way. She’s administrative and she just wanted to do administrative things like have a filing cabinet. What do you even put in a filing cabinet at that age? But God has wired her in that way. I think there’s so much freedom for us to live out some of the redemptive desires that God has given us; however, they always have to be—and this is where people like Elisabeth Elliot are such a good check to our culture. Her thing in her decision-making, which I pulled heavily from in this book, is if there’s a harder way, choose it. And that totally fits her personality.

Matt Tully
What book was that?

Aimee Joseph
Elisabeth Elliot’s book God’s Guidance: A Slow and Certain Light. It’s parts of her story and her processing, but she basically says, If you’re stuck between two things, choose the harder way. I think that’s her personality and her experience and it totally fits. Look at what God did through her life. I would not go so far as to say that, because I don’t think that’s how God works. I don’t think he’s always a hard master. That being said, I think our posture in making decisions needs to be open-handed.

Matt Tully
Don’t always ignore the hard way.

Aimee Joseph
Yes. There are times when God calls us to do really hard things and we’re not going to want to do them. Jesus himself, in the Garden of Gethsemane, says, Father, is there any other way? But he ends it with, Nevertheless, not my will but your will be done. God is going to call us to do hard things, and if we only do things that are comfortable to us we’re not going to grow. We’re not going to be changed. But at the same time, we’re not aesthetics. We don’t have to be hard and cruel to our bodies in order to be godly either. You asked about where desire fits in. One of the tools is the idea of a dashboard of decisions. My friend is in pilot school and is studying for hours and hours everyday to try to pass all these tests to fly planes, which makes me feel good that the people who are flying our planes are actually going through a really vigorous process. But he’s just acclimating himself to all of the gauges in the cockpit. We have all these gauges for decision-making that we pull from, and I think desire should be one of our gauges. I think it’s important; I just don’t think it needs to be the center gauge. The gospel gauge needs to be our center gauge, and when we have the gospel gauge in place and we understand our identity in Christ and we understand that I don’t have to be at an incredible Fortune 500 company to be content, it’s because I know who I am in Christ. Therefore, I can teach kids and not be paid well because God has wired me to do this. When we have the gospel gauge in place, the other ones start to get more right-sized. One of the things I talk about is an idolatry gauge. Our idols inform our decisions, so it’s important to know what the core idols of our heart are. For me, it’s significance. I long to lead a significant life. I want to leave a legacy and I want to do significant things for the Lord. When I was parenting my little kids, I didn’t feel significant at the time. Staying at home didn’t feel significant, and that was hard. It was a hard decision to make. But looking back, I’m so thankful I didn’t let my idol gauge make the decision for me whether or not I was going to be home with my children in their early years. I’m so thankful that I did that. So you have to know what your idols are and how they inform your decisions. If your idol is comfort, then you need to know that you need to right-size that one by the gospel because given the choice and left to my flesh, I’m going to make decisions that are comfortable and easy.

34:11 - Discerning Our Motivations

Matt Tully
When it comes to idols, that kind of gets back to that idea of motivation and decision-making. We’re often so focused on the actual choice and we don’t think a lot about how we’re getting to that choice. Have you ever struggled to even realize idols that might be influencing your motives? I think we can sometimes have a hard time discerning our own motivations for why we’re choosing something.

Aimee Joseph
Totally. Which is why I think we need the body of Christ and even just good question askers in our life. We need people that say, Are you choosing to go to this conference because you’re seeking vain glory, or are you going because you really feel like God is calling you to go? Or, Are you saying no to this option because you’re afraid? Are you not trusting God, or are you saying no to this option in faith?

Matt Tully
Do you have friends who actually ask those questions?

Aimee Joseph
I do. I think I do have friends like that. In the book I talk about trusted trespassers. This idea of trusted trespassers is this idea of people to whom you say, You have the keys to my life, and you get to go trespass and snoop around because I know you love the Lord, I know you love me, and I know you now the gospel. That’s a big one because there are a lot of people that maybe know God’s word and know you but they aren’t gospel fluent. You have to be fluent in the gospel if you’re going to be poking around in someone’s life.

Matt Tully
That can be dangerous and painful.

Aimee Joseph
Yes, and incredibly scary. If you don’t have someone who has really big gospel pants on that can say, What I find in your heart is nasty, but your loved or, That motivation is scary, but Christ knows and you’re forgiven and you’re walking in newness of life. That’s why I say you choose these people very carefully. Find a trusted trespasser—and you don’t need twenty; you need a couple—who can ask you the hard questions and don’t just tell you what you want to hear. They say, What do you think is going on in your heart in this decision? Do you think that’s fear talking right now, or do you think that’s the Lord? What’s going on here? Even asking some of those cultural questions is helpful. On one of the campuses that we work with we have a lot of students that are Asian and they come from an honor/shame culture. In an honor/shame culture the question you ask is not immediately, Is it right or wrong? or Can I do it? or Is it going to make me successful? They ask, How is this going to look for my family? Is this going to bring honor or shame onto my family? They sometimes have to be pressed out of, Are you just doing this because this is what you’re supposed to do? Or is this really what God is calling you to do?Are you doing this in obedience to the Lord? I don’t think we know those things because we’re living in our own skin. It’s the water that we swim in. But I think having people ask good questions is helpful. For example, If you chose that, why do you think you would choose that? What do you think you would get if you made this decision? What is it that you are after in these things? What about your life is going to change if X, Y, or Z? It’s important to learn to be good question askers to each other and to be safe places to process. What are my motivations here? And they’re always mixed. My husband says that he’s never done anything from a pure motive. That doesn’t exist because even our tears of repentance have to be washed. But it’s good to have people asking questions to help us ask, What is going on here? A lot of times, like I said, you kind of get down to a tie break and you say, Okay, Lord, I’m going to choose one of these. Sometimes we’re paralyzed by that, and God is just like, I’m going to be with you either way. I just think of the prodigal and I think about the entire string of bad choices that the prodigal made (the younger brother). I think about the way the father received him back. I’m not saying let’s go disobey, but just make a decision and know that you’re always one decision away from running back to the Lord, repenting, and being close to him.

38:10 - 3 Dangers That Await Us after Making a Decision

Matt Tully
Let’s speak to that a little bit. In your book you talk about three dangers that often await us after we’ve made a decision. Sometimes the fear of those dangers, or looking ahead to the potential of those dangers, can really hamstring our decision-making in the present. What are those three things?

Aimee Joseph
I need to refresh my memory; it’s been a while since I looked at that part. Fear is definitely one, regret, shame at making the wrong choice. It’s kind of like buyer’s remorse and asking, Did I buy the right thing? It’s constantly looking back over your shoulder. I think the freedom of those who walk in the gospel is to know we make a choice, we evaluate our choice, and we can course-correct. We can learn from our choice. For example, schooling decisions; that’s a huge one when you’re a parent. Are you going to home school? Hybrid school? Public school? Charter school? It felt like such a weighty decision when our kids were little, especially when we moved to California. It was just so good to say, We can try this for a couple of months, and if we don’t like it we can try something else. We can course-correct. We don’t have to live in this idea that says, This is the end-all be-all for the rest of our lives. We don’t have to live in regret of these decisions. If we’re following a proper process, we can look back and say, God, you providentially have guided me thus far. Now, what am I to do next? How can I learn from these decisions that I’ve made?

39:38 - What to Do If You’ve Made an Unwise Decision

Matt Tully
What would you say to the person who would say, Looking back, I can see that I made the wrong decisions—I’m confident of that—for the wrong reasons. My motives were not what they should have been. What should that person do now?

Aimee Joseph
Is it a question of—circumstantially and situationally—is it a question of sin? If it’s a question of sin, if I’m walking in sin, then I think the first thing we do is we can repent and we confess. We do exactly what the prodigal did and we say, I shall arise and go to my father. He is running to meet us. He doesn’t even get his “I’m sorry” speech out because the father is there to grab him up. So, I think there’s that. This is a good example: I taught high school for a year—

Matt Tully
Science?

Aimee Joseph
Yes, science and literature. I got to do both at a little private school. I had no teacher training and I had no idea what I was doing. I apologize to all of those parents! There was a man there, and I actually talk about him in the book, and he was a brilliant academic professor for anatomy and physiology at a very prestigious medical school. He would say he was good at it. He was really good at it. God opened doors, he had a ministry through it, but he hated it. He hated it. He started reading Piper and the idea of Christian hedonism and the idea that God is most glorified when we are most satisfied in him. He thought, I am not satisfied in God when I do this work. I hate it. So, he took a major pay cut, went to seminary, and now he’s a pastor of a small church in a rural town. But while he was there he was in my little school, and we would just talk. We would talk about the future, we would talk about life, about how to make decisions. He would look back and say, I made a decision based on what I was good at and what everyone told me was prestigious and right and good. There was a need and I could meet it. I realized that this wasn’t the decision I wanted to make. I don’t want to do this anymore. So, I course-corrected. I was willing to make an action step. That does mean that everyone should just quit their job if they’re not in their job for the proper motivation, but that’s the joy of freedom in Christ. We have freedom to make real choices with real consequences. If it’s a marriage question, like Oh no, I think I married the wrong person, then you don’t just get to say Let’s course-correct and get out of here! There are situational factors to this. But first, if it is a decision to sin, you repent. If it was an unwise decision, I think you process it with the Lord and you say What can I learn from this unwise decision? How can I not repeat this unwise decision? For example, binge watching Netflix. Is that a sin? No. But was that the best choice of your Friday night? I don’t know. You need to process that with the Lord. But if you say I feel funny about that decision, you can then go before the Lord and ask Why do I feel funny? I shouldn’t have done that or, I shouldn’t have said that to my child. We can course-correct and walk in freedom in that.

Matt Tully
I think that’s where confidence in God’s sovereignty over those decisions can be so comforting too.

Aimee Joseph
Yes. If you think about the phrase God writes straight with crooked sticks—he’s making straight paths with my crazy decisions and he’s working it together for good and for the glory of God (Rom. 8:28). That is powerful. That is beautiful. You don’t have to look further than the Scriptures to see stories of people who botched it, and yet God graciously wrote them into the story of what he was doing in the world and has far overcompensated for those things. Just that nature and character of who God is, and that he cares about the process. He’s ready to receive us. He’s very ready for us to repent and to run and to learn. He’s not an angry Father. He doesn’t chide. Another example of that is Narnia. When Edmond makes the bad decision—White Witch, Turkish Delight. By the way, have you ever had that?

Matt Tully
It’s not that good.

Aimee Joseph
I don’t understand why he was so tempted by it. Maybe if it was a Reese’s cup or something. But then he finally gets put right with Aslan. The White Witch is there, his siblings are there, and it says he just kept looking at Aslan. Aslan took him away privately and they had a little moment with him, kind of like what Jesus did with Peter. They had their moment of forgiveness and reinstatement that said You’re forgiven and loved, and then he just kept looking at Aslan. We are forgiven and loved and we are not the sum of our past choices. Shameful as some of them may be, I am the inheritor of Christ’s choices, and that is my identity. From that identity I am now free to make the kind of choices that honor God. I think God is pleased with our want to want. I think he’s pleased with our want to want to make decisions that honor him. I have a son who is very much like me: he’s perfectionistic, ordered, linear, and he just wants to make the right decisions. Sometimes I’m like, Oh my goodness! Just make the decision! You’re loved; you’re going to be fine! Do you want to go to the movie or not? So, just having that perspective of God’s good, fatherly nature helps to transform this decision-making process.

Matt Tully
Amy, thank you so much for talking with me today and helping all of us to think a little bit more theologically about the decisions that confront us. We appreciate it.

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