You search the categories for romantic comedies.
So many options.
“What do you want to watch?”
“I don’t know, what do you want to watch?”
It’s now 7:03. You’ve spent 33 minutes scrolling through the Netflix library trying to pick something. You finally settle on old episodes of The Office because you’re too exhausted to pick a new movie. You should have started there because you’ve done this same thing the past ten date nights.
Ah, the tyranny of choice.
Studies show that more choice, while certainly better than no choice, is not in fact better than less choices. (This piece by Barry Schwartz is quite informative). All of our options are making us miserable. Now add to this a spiritual component and we’re going to be crippled by choice. Not only do you have now multiple choices but you’ve also got a theology which says only one of this choices will uncover God’s mysterious will. Pick the wrong door and you’re confined to an existence always trying to catch up to God’s best for your life.
I’m glad that some have called this theology into question. I’ve long appreciated Augustine’s maxim to love God and do what you want. But if I’m being honest such a thing still left me wandering out in the desert. I still had the tyranny of choice to deal with and now I’d undercut what I perceived as help from the Lord. My choices slowly morphed into “it doesn’t really matter”. And I knew in my soul that this wasn’t all the way true either. While it’s true that not every decision is a moral decision it isn’t true that morality isn’t involved.
Then I stumbled upon this little gem by Scott Hafemann in his commentary on 2 Corinthians. He was interacting with Paul’s discussion of his itinerary with the Corinthians. It’d caused a bit of a rift between them. And so Paul had to explain why his travel plans changed. Hafemann uses this situation to show how the apostle can be a model for us in decision making:
Paul’s concern was not whether this or that itinerary corresponded to some hidden “will of God” that he must set out to discover, but whether his itinerary would reflect the character and purposes of God in Christ…we must rediscover the Bible itself as the focal point for finding God’s purposes…But in turning to the Bible, we must not pervert it into some kind of ‘Ouija-board’ filled with secret messages for our future…When confronted with major decisions in life, the question is not, ‘Do I have a personally revealed word from God about this situation?’ but, ‘What does God’s Word say about the God of this situation?’ Paul’s perspective calls us to worry less about finding God’s will for my circumstances and more about discovering God’s character as the pattern for my life. (Hafemann, 97)
This is incredibly helpful because it gives us a target. Our quest isn’t to uncover some hidden agenda but it is to work towards increasingly reflecting the character of God. This means that what probably matters more for our futures isn’t the particular decision that we make but the way in which we make a particular decision. With our focus on the character of God and reflecting him we can be confident that the decisions we make will be honoring to Him.
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