![]() ![]() ![]() They reveal our character and help to create our character. But what we often overlook is not only how our choices shape outcomes but how they shape us too. We know decisions are important because each one carries a consequence. At every turn, I was eager to hear from God. I felt needy, open, aware, and ready to listen. If I understand it, then I can control it…ĭuring that period of time when I was trying to make the decision, my focus was on the decision itself, but I also noticed something shifting within me. If we don’t have clear answers or sure things, then taking a big step feels like a risk at best and a wasteful mistake at worst. No wonder we have trouble making decisions. We think if we can understand it, then we can control it.” It’s true, don’t you think? We are conditioned to believe the only reason we should do things is if we know why, where we are headed, and for what purpose. “Our Western minds are trained to go down the path of explaining. And then an interesting conversation happened between Freeman and her spiritual director: After a prolonged period of discussing the options over and over, eventually Freeman made the choice to enroll. In her book, The Next Right Thing, Emily Freeman describes the difficulty in making decisions, including the decision that would eventually lead to her enrollment in Graduate school. Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death (New York: Penguin Classics, 1989), pp. Eventually they are in entire agreement, since knowing has now deserted to the side of the will and allows it to be known that what the will wants is quite right. And then when the knowing has become duly obscured, the will and the knowing can better understand one another. If it doesn’t like the knowledge, it doesn’t immediately follow that the will goes and does the opposite of what was grasped in knowing - such strong contrasts are presumably rare but then the will lets some time pass there is an interim called “We’ll look into it tomorrow.”ĭuring all this knowing becomes more and more obscured, and the lower nature more and more victorious…. The will is dialectical and has underneath it the whole of man’s lower nature. Next comes the question of what the will thinks of the knowledge. …if a person does not do what is right the very second he knows it is the right thing to do-then, for a start, the knowledge comes off the boil. It is the “little tiny transition from having understood to doing.” Here’s what he says about it: In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard describes a “moment” familiar to all of us. ![]()
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